Pioneering approaches in open peer review

Scholarly communication is transforming more rapidly than ever before. Policy, community norms and technology are all reshaping the ways in which we think about how research is shared and evaluated. While some of these factors offer promising new avenues–growing open science culture, new platforms and tools– the ever-present challenge for scholarly communication is to evolve in ways that make the most of these benefits while upholding integrity. 

Peer review plays a foundational role in shaping scientific knowledge, but often isn’t the focus when we talk about innovation in research communication. We believe openness throughout the research process, including during peer review, is important to not only increase transparency, but to support more flexible and integrated forms of knowledge sharing.

Open peer review comes in different forms such as signed reviews, publicly available peer review reports and ways of opening the peer review process to a wider pool of experts. This Peer Review Week we take a look back at our long-standing commitment to make the peer review process more transparent and a new initiative that brings open peer review to preprints for authors submitting to PLOS Global Public Health.

Linking peer review to preprints 

In a new pilot supported by the Gates Foundation, authors submitting to PLOS Global Public Health can now opt in to have their peer review comments posted to their preprint as their manuscript undergoes formal evaluation. This initiative brings together two key strands of our open science strategy: encouraging preprint sharing and promoting transparent peer review.

Why does this matter? While many publishers support preprints and/or offer some form of transparent peer review, linking official peer reviewer reports to preprints is a novel approach to opening up more of the research publishing process.

Preprints offer an important pathway  for rapid dissemination, especially in fields like global health where timely access to research can have real-world impact. By linking peer review comments to preprints, we’re enabling readers to benefit from expert evaluations earlier in the research lifecycle. This approach also signals when a preprint has undergone peer review, enhancing trust and surfacing the full scholarly conversation around the work.

We’re also eager to learn from this pilot: What motivates authors to share their reviews? How do readers engage with peer-reviewed preprints? The answers will help shape the future of how we can support open science beyond the traditional article format.

Our continuing efforts to open peer review

Open peer review is essential to a healthy research ecosystem. It promotes accountability and reduces potential for bias, by making the evaluation process visible. It supports integrity by surfacing the expert assessment that underpins the evaluation of research. 

We are continually innovating to understand how we can make peer review more open, efficient, and recognized for its importance. In 2019, we launched Published Peer Review History, allowing authors to opt in to share their complete peer review reports combining reviewer comments and editorial decisions alongside their published articles. We’ve long supported reviewers who wish to sign their reviews, and integrate with tools like ORCID to enable reviewer credit even for anonymous reviews. We encourage editors to consider preprint comments as part of the peer review process across all our journals. 

PLOS has partnered with Review Commons since 2020 to provide a journal-agnostic, high-quality peer review service for authors of preprints in bioRxiv and medRxiv who wish to submit to our life sciences journals. Earlier this year we also announced a new partnership between PLOS Biology and MetaROR to consider reviews that accompany submissions of metaresearch that have already been evaluated on the site.This partnership builds on the journal’s collaboration with PCI-Registered Reports and other PCI communities, as well as its existing commitment to portable peer review, which allows authors to submit reviews from previous submissions to other journals to expedite editorial decisions and reduce strain on the reviewer pool.

These practices reflect our belief that transparency in peer review fosters trust, accountability, efficiency, and a richer scholarly dialogue. But openness is a journey, not a destination. As the means of sharing research evolves beyond the article, so too must our approaches to peer review. As we continue to innovate, we remain committed to listening and learning from researchers, maintaining open dialogue to ensure that we build solutions that advance open science while remaining tailored to the needs of our authors and contributors.