Peer Community in
PCI, a free recommendation process of scientific
preprints based on peer reviews and a journal
PCI is a non-profit organization of researchers offering peer review, recommendation and publication of scientific articles in open access for free.
Following submission by authors, the thematic PCIs evaluate preprints in their scientific fields based on rigorous peer review. After evaluation, the PCIs may recommend those preprints, to make them complete, reliable and citable articles, without the need for publication in ‘traditional’ journals. Authors who need to publish their article in a journal can publish it for free in Peer Community Journal or submit it to a PCI-friendly or other journal.
The recommendation of an article is a positive editorial decision made by a recommender based on at least two rigorous peer reviews and after one or several rounds of peer reviews. The recommendations are published in the corresponding thematic PCI websites with a DOI and can be cited.
As part of the Diamond Open Access ecosystem, PCI allows scientists to regain control of the scientific publication process and disconnect it from financial issues. PCI also wants to refocus scientific quality on articles rather than on journals.
PCI IN A FEW WORDS
Stimulating: Each PCI recommends remarkable articles in its field.
Open: PCI is an open-science initiative based on:
- open access to the recommended articles (on preprint servers and open archives)
- open access to the evaluation (reviews, author’s responses and editorial decisions)
- data, scripts and code available to the readers
- an open infrastructure: The code, page texts (help texts, about, instructions, etc.) and automatic Email templates are available on the PCI github repository https://github.com/pci-dev.
Free: The whole PCI process is free for any user (readers, authors…). The websites of the PCIs are freely accessible.
Independent: PCI in not-for-profit and non-commercial. It is managed by scientists for scientists. Conflicts of interest are carefully checked at each step of the process.
Inclusive: An article recommended by a PCI may subsequently be published in a traditional journal (although this is not the goal of the PCIs).
Reliable: Decisions are based on sound evaluations by at least 2 reviewers. The Managing Board checks the quality of reviews, decisions, and recommendations.
Peer Community In complies with publishing ethics guidelines.
REASONS TO BELIEVE IN PCI
The PCI evaluation process is high-quality, free, and transparent. It is likely to succeed for the following reasons:
1. It fulfills the open science commitments requested by an increasing number of institutions, countries, funding agencies
- All articles recommended by PCI have open data, scripts, and code.
- All articles recommended by PCI are open access, freely accessible on preprint servers or institutional open archives
- PCI ensures transparent peer review
2. It results in a peer-reviewed article that can be cited as is or published in a journal
- Authors are free to either leave their recommended article on the preprint server or, if they need journal articles for their career, to publish it directly to Peer Community Journal or submit it to a PCI-friendly journal
3. It provides a solution to value reviewing and editorial work
- Recommendations (and associated reviews) are citable with their DOI
- Reviewers can choose to publish their names or to remain anonymous
- Institutions have direct access to the reviewing work of their researchers since each recommender of a thematic PCI has a page for displaying and reporting their reviews, comments, and recommendations (example).
4. It focuses on the scientific contents of articles and watches out for the ethical rules of publication
- Conflicts of interest are kept track of throughout the process
- Financial conflict of interest are forbidden
- In specific fields of research, PCI mandates approval from ethics committees and institutional review boards
5. It shares the workload between researchers
- Recommenders, unlike associate editors in traditional scientific journals, have no commitment to review and recommend papers. Each recommender is rather encouraged to review and recommend 1 or 2 articles per year in average.
- Because of the high number of recommenders, PCI will not be jeopardized if some recommenders are inactive and if the number of submissions sharply increases.
6. It benefits from a solid infrastructure
- PCI is managed by scientists from research institutions.
- It was funded by the French National Open Science Fund.
- It is financially supported by many universities and research bodies.
- PCI ensures long-time conservation of its contents in CLOCKSS.
