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Community Peer Review: A Collaborative Future for Research Evaluation

By   Tony Alves Aug 18, 2025 3754 12

The scholarly publishing ecosystem is undergoing a subtle but significant revolution. As traditional journal-based peer review struggles under the weight of inefficiencies, bias, and lack of transparency, a new model is emerging, one rooted in community, openness, and technological interoperability. Community peer review is no longer a fringe experiment; it is the foundation of a growing network of organizations and infrastructures reshaping how research is evaluated, shared, and trusted.

From Gatekeeping to Grassroots Evaluation
At the heart of this transformation is a shift in mindset. Traditional peer review centers authority within individual journals, often relying on a closed, anonymous process. Community peer review, by contrast, disperses that authority across a diverse and inclusive web of reviewers, many of whom are early-career researchers, independent scholars, or members of historically excluded groups. Platforms such as PREreview, Peer Community In (PCI), Review Commons, Sciety, and preLights are leading the way in providing community-led, publicly available evaluations of research, often at the preprint stage.

This new model fosters openness, speed, and collaboration. Reviews are not hidden behind paywalls or inside journal systems but are made available publicly, often with the reviewer’s name attached, contributing to a culture of transparency and accountability. Importantly, these platforms are not working in isolation. They are forming a decentralized but interconnected network, where peer review becomes a shared, community-driven responsibility.

Benefits of the Community Peer Review Model
Community peer review offers several critical advantages:

  • Transparency: Publicly available reviews and comments ensure that the evaluation process is open and accountable.
  • Efficiency: Authors receive feedback faster, often well before journal submission.
  • Diversity: A wider range of reviewers, including early-career and global researchers. brings fresh perspectives to scientific discourse.
  • Training and inclusion: Programs like PREreview’s Open Reviewers and ASAPbio’s Crowd Preprint Review help train new reviewers and democratize participation.
  • Reduced redundancy: Reviews conducted through services like Review Commons can travel with the manuscript to partner journals, eliminating repetitive re-review cycles.

These benefits collectively support a more equitable, rigorous, and timely evaluation of research, especially important in fields where scientific developments move quickly and public trust in science must be maintained.

Infrastructure Supporting the Movement
Community peer review isn't just a social movement, it is underpinned by a growing technical infrastructure designed to enable interoperability, visibility, and credit. Key developments include:

  • COAR Notify: Facilitates communication between preprint repositories and peer review platforms or overlay journals, enabling preprints to be reviewed, curated, and discovered more easily.
  • DocMaps: Provides machine-readable documentation of the peer review process, capturing the editorial journey and helping platforms, funders, and readers track research quality.
  • MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach): Standardizes the transfer of reviews and manuscripts between systems, supporting seamless handoffs between preprint platforms and journals.
  • Persistent identifiers like ORCID, DOIs, and RRIDs ensure that authorship, peer review contributions, and research objects can be correctly tracked and cited across platforms.

Together, these tools form the connective tissue of a distributed, interoperable peer review ecosystem, allowing research evaluation to evolve independently of traditional publishing gatekeepers.

An Emerging Ecosystem: Collaboration in Action
What’s most striking is how these platforms and technologies are increasingly working in concert. Sciety aggregates reviews from PREreview, Review Commons, ASAPbio, and others to give readers a holistic view of a preprint’s credibility. Platforms like bioRxiv and medRxiv display links to public reviews from trusted third parties like ReviewCommons. Projects such as the Map the Preprint Metadata Transfer Ecosystem, co-organized by Europe PMC and ASAPbio, are documenting how metadata and peer review reports can flow between repositories, journals, and services, laying the groundwork for a fully integrated scholarly communication system.

Even traditional journals are experimenting with this new model. In collaboration with PREreview, journals like Current Research in Neurobiology incorporate community reviews into their editorial process. Overlay journals such as JMIRx use reviews generated by external communities to validate preprints. These examples show that community peer review is not a replacement for editorial oversight, but a complementary, enriching layer of scientific evaluation.

Looking Ahead: A Trustworthy, Inclusive Peer Review Future
Community peer review is no longer an experiment on the margins. It is a viable, scalable, and increasingly accepted component of scholarly publishing. As more funders, institutions, and journals recognize its value, the infrastructure to support it will continue to grow.

By embracing community-led evaluation, supported by open infrastructure and persistent identifiers, the scholarly community is building a system where quality, transparency, and inclusivity are no longer aspirations but standard practice. The future of peer review may be distributed, but it is more connected, credible, and collaborative than ever before.

Keywords

Community Peer Review PREreview Review Commons Overlay Journals Open Peer Review Research Evaluation Preprints Sciety COAR Notify DocMaps MECA ORCID Scholarly Communication Open Science Peer Review Infrastructure

Tony Alves
Tony Alves

Tony Alves has worked in scholarly publishing since 1990 focusing on digital publishing, designing workflow management software and online products. Tony is SVP of Product Management at HighWire Press, the platforms division of MPS Limited, overseeing a suite of platform products that address the entire scholarly publishing infrastructure, from workflow to hosting to analytics. Tony promotes industry standardization, particularly system-to-system communications protocols and other industry shared services. He also participates in various initiatives focused on peer review, research integrity, persistent identifiers, and open science. To support those interests, Tony serves on boards and in working groups with organizations like NISO, STM, Crossref, ORCID, OA Switchboard, CSE, and ACSE. He also organizes educational sessions and webinars, and writes articles and blog posts, on these topics and others.

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