Congratulations PREreview

We are thrilled to announce that PREreview has been awarded two grants, one from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and one from the Wellcome Trust. In this post, PREreview tells the CS&S community about the exciting work these grants will fund!

The Sloan grant will allow us to develop PREreview 2.0, a new version of the platform designed from the ground up with our community in mind. Community members will be able to sign-in with their ORCID IDs (with optional pseudonymity), solicit preprint feedback, leave comments, and endorse others’ reviews, all in accordance with PREreview’s Code of Conduct.

The Wellcome Trust Open Research Fund grant was written in collaboration with the non-profit organization Outbreak Science, and will support the development of Rapid PREreview, an extension of PREreview 2.0 dedicated to facilitate rapid assessment of preprints during public health crises, and to generate aggregated data visualizations based on feedback.

At PREreview we recognize feedback can be valuable in every shape or form, as long as it is constructive. We will provide different PREreview templates to allow researchers to contribute to the feedback in different ways: from a structured and short, questionnaire-like type more suitable for a rapid assessment, to a longer and detailed report more similar to a journal-organized peer review.

It is our priority to develop PREreview in the open and in a modular fashion such that it (or parts of it) can be used and adapted in other disciplines that might require similar rapid evaluation.

We are immensely thankful for the help and support received from our community in this past year. In particular, we want to recognize the contribution of Authorea, whose team helped us transition from a few Google docs worth of resources to a functioning publishing platform. We also thank Mozilla for their support throughout the life of this project and Code for Science & Society for being a fantastic fiscal sponsor (they are more like our personal Yoda!).

We invite you all to follow our progress on the project’s GitHub. Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter: @PREreview_.