Development and Journal of Cell Science, both published by The Company of Biologists, are expanding their collaboration with Review Commons in a six-month pilot. Editors of the two journals will participate in coordinating the peer review of initial submissions to the preprint peer review platform in the fields of developmental and cell biology.
Marcel LaFlamme, Open Research Manager at the Public Library of Science (PLOS), spoke with us about how peer reviewed preprints can contribute to the goal of advancing Open Science beyond the published article as well as his views on the different uses of peer review, automated reviewing and more.
The revision plan template is a new piece of the constantly evolving refereed preprint package that Review Commons offers its authors – a bridge from preprint to paper.
Hanson has been interested in the innate immune response since his Master’s thesis work with Steve Perlman at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia. There he worked on the evolution of the immune system in a “weird, non-conventional fly species that has a nematode parasite and a defensive symbiont. We were curious about how the immune system adapted to this three-way interaction.”
Caren Norden heads the Cell Biology of Tissue Morphogenesis lab at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, where she also serves as Deputy Director of Science. Her latest paper was posted as a preprint and submitted to the journal through Review Commons. We spoke to Dr. Norden about preprints, peer review, imaging and neuronal migration.
Marco Trizzino is an assistant professor at Thomas Jefferson University, in Philadelphia. Dr. Trizzino studies evolutionary genomics, with a focus on transposable elements. SVA transposons are the topic of his recent refereed preprint at Review Commons.
Our latest survey shows that the overwhelming majority of our authors and reviewers support our journal agnostic peer-review process and consider the elimination of multiple cycles of peer review to be the most important benefit of Review Commons. Authors also regard the preparation of the authors’ detailed response as the rate-limiting step for the public posting of refereed preprints.
In a major step toward promoting preprint peer review as a means of increasing transparency and efficiency in scientific publishing, Review Commons is updating its policy: as of 1 June 2022, peer reviews and the authors’ response will be publicly posted by Review Commons to bioRxiv or medRxiv when authors transfer their refereed preprint to the first affiliate journal.
EMBO, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, eLife/Sciety, and the Knowledge Futures Group have recently launched a collaborative pilot project called DocMaps. The project’s goal is to create a common framework that will allow the machine-readable tracking of the peer reviews of individual preprints.
As of August 1, 2021, Review Commons will require all authors to post their manuscript as a preprint, prior to transfer to an affiliate journal. In return, all the affiliate journals provide authors with extended scooping protection.