\u201cI found the idea interesting and thought it would be cool to contribute,\u201d says the physicist, who is studying scientific collaboration networks in Brazil\u2019s science education research community. He found Ara\u00fajo’s article by searching the platform for Portuguese social science manuscripts and looking for the most recent ones in education. To provide or request reviews, authors and reviewers need to log on to the system using their ORCID ID, a sequence of numbers used to identify researchers. \u201cI usually do reviews for national and international journals and they involve an element of judgment. In addition to evaluating the manuscript and suggesting corrections if needed, the objective is to help the editorial board decide whether to accept or reject the manuscript. But when reviewing a preprint, this is not the case and the objective is purely collaborative,\u201d says Fontes, who also intends to submit a paper of his own for evaluation on the platform.<\/p>\n
For now, there are still few who are aware of the service. According to data from PREreview, 3,307 authors and reviewers registered on the website between its creation in 2017 and mid-April this year, with 795 preprint reviews requested and 64 completed (8.1%). Of these requests, 526 came via SciELO Preprints. Brazil accounts for the third most visits to the website, behind researchers from the USA and the UK.<\/p>\n
There are more preprints than experts willing to analyze them<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The low membership figures reflect the difficulty preprints have in attracting readers and generating appreciation for their content. Of 3,330 manuscripts published on the SciELO server in the last three years, less than 5% received some form of review or comment. \u201cThis happens with other similar servers around the world. There are many more preprints than researchers available to analyze them,\u201d notes technology and digital media specialist Alex Mendon\u00e7a, coordinator of the Brazilian platform. One of PREreview\u2019s weaknesses is that it does not have a system to notify all authors when their paper is reviewed\u2014when a researcher uses the service via SciELO, for example, they are not notified and need to regularly visit the website to check for feedback. \u201cWhen a review is published, we encourage reviewers to contact the authors and let them know that they have reviewed their work, if they wish,\u201d the PREreview team said in an email to Pesquisa FAPESP<\/em>. SciELO does not have a feedback notification system either.<\/p>\nThere are two ways to request a review of a preprint on the platform: by uploading the manuscript to a repository integrated with PREreview, such as SciELO Preprints, or by stating the DOI (digital object identifier) of the document, if it is uploaded to a registered repository. Authors may receive short comments or longer, more structured reviews. Volunteer reviewers decide how they want to share their opinion and if they need help formulating their review, a template is available with a sequence of questions to be answered, such as whether the introduction adequately explains the objective of the research. There are also guidelines on behavior: reviewers should be respectful of the authors and give constructive feedback, for example.<\/p>\n
A team of five works full-time for the website, which is supported by the Gates Foundation, the Mozzilla Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. \u201cThe idea is to make peer review more transparent; it is still an opaque process controlled by large, for-profit publishers,\u201d says librarian Edilson Damasio of the State University of Maring\u00e1 (UEM). He is one of the platform’s volunteer ambassadors, so-called champions, whose task is to provide support and training to communities in their countries. Damasio highlights that every opinion receives an automatic DOI and is made available in the Zenodo repository. PREreview also offers training for those who want to improve as a reviewer: the platform’s team conducts live reviews of manuscripts and streams them online to train new reviewers. There are also workshops, some of them paid.<\/p>\n
The website has a page with freely accessible guides and materials to train and guide reviewers. This content has been used by Brazilian information scientist Janaynne Carvalho do Amaral, who is currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is researching open peer review and the importance of teaching researchers how to perform peer reviews. She has been training undergraduate and graduate students on the topic at the American university since 2023, using PREreview\u2019s material in her workshops. At a recent session, she hosted 80 researchers from Kazakhstan who were visiting the university. \u201cThis type of initiative encourages collaboration and helps improve peer review,\u201d says Amaral, who reported on her experiences of the first workshops in an article published in the journal Learned Publishing <\/em>in February 2025.<\/p>\nThe story above was published with the title “Feedback welcome<\/strong>” in issue 351 of May\/2025.<\/p>\nScientific article<\/strong>
\nAMARAL, C. J. et al.<\/em> Librarians at the center of peer review training: Increasing collaboration among scholarly communication stakeholders<\/a>. Learned Publishing<\/strong>. Vol. 38, n\u00b0 2. Feb. 2, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"American website is integrated with SciELO and other international repositories","protected":false},"author":684,"featured_media":551856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2721],"class_list":["post-567139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-policies-st-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/684"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":567140,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567139\/revisions\/567140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567139"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=567139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}