Progress in open research!

It’s been a while since my last post where I outlined ideas for how science may be done better. In the interim I’ve submitting my PhD thesis and am impatiently awaiting my viva (where one defends their thesis to experts, which you need to pass to be awarded your PhD!). I also started my new role as a Research Associate (the posh formal title for a Post-Doc) at the Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University which has been a good mix of exciting and terrifying.

But, I recently came across a really cool initiative that attempts to implement some of the ideas I explored in the last post, called the Peer Community in.

Figure 1: Image credit: PCI

Looking at the above outline, the PCI works by inviting authors to first submit their papers to a preprint servers with their code and data. Then the authors can submit their DOI to the PCI whereupon a member of the community can recommend the paper as worthy of review. Then others in the community are invited to review the paper, and go through a typical peer-review process with new versions being updated on the preprint server. Once the reviewers are happy that the paper is of sufficient quality they give the article a recommendation, which itself is a separate, citable document with a DOI.

At this stage the authors can submit their article to a PCI-friendly journal which will typically accept the recommended paper without applying their own peer-review process. The key benefit here is that the peer-review is divorced from the various biases a journal can bring to this process. The PCI also have their own Peer Community Journal which will always accept the recommendation and publish the article as open-access for free!

Figure 2: Image credit: PCI

This last option of publishing with the Peer Community Journal is particularly appealing to me, especially at a time where other journals are exploiting their position to charge an outrageous open-access fee of up to €9,500 ($11,500) per paper. I won’t rehash my rant outlining my feeling towards these parasitic journals, if you need a refresher though, that post can be found here.

They also have a video explaining the process I’d recommend watching:

I will certainly support this model in my future work as much as I am able to, and encourage any of my peers to do the same. I truly hope this model finds success as I firmly believe it will lead to fairer and better quality science.

If you’re keen to support PCI, please see their guidance here!