FAQs

PCI was created by Denis Bourguet, Benoit Facon and Thomas Guillemaud, senior scientists at INRAE (the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment). The PCI websites and e-mail system were initially developed by Sylvain Piry and Alexandre Dehne Garcia, engineers at INRAE.

PCI is a non-profit and non-commercial scientific organization that aims to recommend, after peer review, for free, articles or registered reports posted on preprint servers and other open-access repositories. PCI is organised in thematic communities entitled Peer Community in X, e.g. Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology, or PCI Ecology. PCI also publishes a diamond open-access journal, Peer Community Journal, where all recommended articles can be published if the authors choose.

PCI aims to provide scientists with a free, stimulating, transparent and non-exclusive way to evaluate, validate, publish, and promote their scientific output. The thematic PCIs aim to highlight and recommend articles of particular interest to the community concerned. The articles recommended by PCIs are of high value, reliable, and citable. After their preprint is recommended, authors can choose to keep it on a preprint server, publish it directly and at no cost in the Peer Community Journal, or submit it to a PCI-friendly journal or any other journal.

PCI is a non-profit association (French 1901 law). Its statutes, in French, can be downloaded here. A translation in English is here.

Yes, the Managing Board can exclude recommenders if their recommendations are of insufficient quality, if they do not do their job properly, or if they do not comply with the code of conduct of PCI.

In each PCI, new recommenders are nominated by current recommenders and approved by the Managing Board. If you are interested in becoming a recommender, please contact a current recommender in your field or a member of the Managing Board of a PCI.

Yes. Each PCI regularly backs up its data (reviews, editorial decisions, author’s replies, and recommendations) on several mirror websites stored in CLOCKSS for long-term archiving.

Yes, as long as their expertise is recognised by their peers and they have already published on the subject. Recommenders are generally selected among post PhD people, who conduct independent research and have at least a handful of first-author articles (to ensure people have some experience with the publishing process).

No editing or formatting of the preprint (including, in particular, for references) is required before submission to a PCI, but we advise using these templates. The preprint should be presented to facilitate peer review (e.g. line numbering, etc.). Complete instructions for authors are listed in the Guide for authors of each thematic PCI website, e.g. here.

No. Any preprints can be recommended if a recommender agrees to handle its evaluation and recommends them based on the reviewers’ reports. However, not all submitted preprints are managed by a recommender, and not all handled preprints are recommended because not all preprints achieve the required quality.

Authors can submit their preprint to a thematic PCI via its website. The article must have been deposited on a preprint server, open archive or institutional repository before submission. Templates are available for submission. The preprint submitted to a thematic PCI must not be published or under consideration for publication in a journal. Any recommender interested in handling the evaluation of the preprint can initiate the peer-review process.

If no recommender agrees to handle the evaluation of the preprint after 20 days, it is returned to the authors. Depending on the size of the thematic PCI, the number of preprints awaiting evaluation, and their quality, a fraction of the preprint submitted may not be considered further.

The processes of publication and recommendation are not exclusive: a preprint evaluated by a PCI can subsequently be submitted to a journal. However, parallel submission to a journal and to a PCI — i.e. submission to a PCI at the same time as submission to a journal — is not permitted because:

– Parallel peer review wastes time and effort for the scientific community.

– Sequential evaluation (by a PCI first and then submission to a journal) is more likely to result in scientific improvement of the preprint.

– A growing number of journals accept PCI evaluations as part of their editorial process.

When submitting their preprint to a PCI, the authors suggest several suitable recommenders based on the topic. If a recommender decides to handle the preprint, this recommender initiates the peer-review process. This process is very similar to the evaluation process for publication in a journal and includes at least two high-quality peer reviews. Based on these reviews, the recommender may reject the preprint, recommend it as it stands, or ask the authors to revise their article. Several rounds of reviews may be required before the recommender decides to reject or recommend a preprint. The recommender can recommend the article once satisfactory responses have been obtained from the authors and the necessary changes have been made. Once validated by the Managing Board, the “recommendation” and all the editorial correspondence (reviews, decisions, authors’ replies) are then published by the thematic PCI.

Yes, see this page for instance. Please choose the right thematic PCI.

• The authors are responsible for the contents of their preprints.
• The reviewers are responsible for the contents of their review report and for evaluating the preprint in accordance with the code of conduct of PCI.
• The recommenders handling the preprint are responsible for organising the peer-review process, for their editorial decision and the contents of their recommendation in accordance with the code of conduct of PCI.
• The Managing Board is responsible for validating submissions, decisions and recommendations and for the functioning of the thematic PCI.

• Reviewers can choose to sign their reviews that are published on the recommendation page. They can share the link to their reviews  or to their personal page on the thematic PCI website (their reviews are available on both pages). Their reviews are, therefore, directly accessible by any evaluation committee.
• Recommenders always sign the recommendation published on the thematic PCI website with a DOI. They can, therefore, include the reference of the recommendation in their list of scientific productions. Their editorial contribution is hence directly accessible by any evaluation committee.

Once a preprint is recommended, all information leading to its recommendation is made public:

• The recommender’s name recommending the preprint, their editorial decisions and recommendation text, the reviews and suggested corrections, and the authors’ replies are available from the thematic PCI website.
• The consecutive versions of the preprint are freely accessible in open archives.

Only the reviewers’ names may be withheld if they choose to remain anonymous.

Bias, cronyism, retaliation and flattery are limited by i) the transparency of the reviews, which are freely available and may be signed, and ii) the transparency of recommendation texts, which are freely available and must be signed. In addition, PCI has established a code of conduct (no conflict of interest, no recommendation of articles authored by close colleagues and/or friends, etc.) to be followed by recommenders, reviewers and authors. The Managing Board of the thematic PCI performs quality control to ensure reviews and recommendations comply with these ethical guidelines.

No, only reviews and comments leading to the attribution of a recommendation (positive, but with criticisms and suggestions for improvement) are published. When a preprint is rejected, the reviews and comments are sent to the authors but are not published.

Yes, all authors, whether or not they belong to PCI, can submit their preprints to PCI. These articles follow the same process, and the Managing Board (excluding any members who are co-authors of the submitted article) ensures that the Code of conduct is followed. If the preprint is recommended, the Conflicts of Interest section should mention the authors who act as recommenders in the thematic PCI.

No copy-editing of the articles is carried out by PCI. However, PCI provides templates (word, Latex) to the authors to format their preprint for submission. After a recommendation, the authors can put a badge on the 1st page of their preprint with a link to the recommendation so that readers know that this version of the preprint was peer-reviewed and recommended by a PCI – e.g. see this preprint.

Some institutions require authors to deposit their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in their institutional repositories. This is the case, for example, at the CNRS, which has an open-access policy requiring researchers to deposit their accepted manuscripts in HAL (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr). In such cases, we advise authors to deposit the version of the preprint recommended by PCI in their institutional repository.

Yes, recommended preprints are indexed. OpenAlex and Google Scholar index all sorts of documents (articles, books, reports, etc.), including preprints deposited in repositories such as arXiv, bioRxiv, and Hal. Therefore, these platforms record preprint citations in the same way they record citations of journal articles.

BioRxiv and MedRxiv both index preprints that are recommended by PCI here.

Europe PMC also indexes preprints (with a DOI) recommended by PCI. It is possible to search for preprints recommended by a PCI by performing an advanced search with “Peer Community In” in the External Links menu or by pasting “(LABS_PUBS:”1826″)” in the search bar. This is a direct link to the articles recommended by a PCI: https://europepmc.org/search?query=%28LABS_PUBS:%221826%22%29

However, PCI-recommended preprints are not indexed in article databases such as Dimensions, Semantic Scholar, PubMed or Web of Science. This is one of the reasons PCI offers authors of recommended preprints to publish them in its diamond Open-Access journal, Peer Community Journal.

Once a preprint has been recommended by a PCI, the authors can opt to leave it on a preprint server, to publish it in Peer Community Journal, to submit it to a PCI-friendly journal or to any other journal.

Most scientific journals accept the citation of preprints in the reference list of their publications (see reference), provided that they are correctly cited. Recommended preprints have a specific reference format indicating they were peer-reviewed and recommended. They can, therefore, be cited.

Most (more and more) journals are accepting articles deposited as preprints in open archives for submission. See https://openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/

First, almost all journals accept articles deposited as preprints in open archives or preprint servers for submission.

Second, a preprint reviewed and recommended by PCI has a guaranteed level of quality. It is not a published article. There is, therefore, no reason for a journal to refuse the submission of PCI recommended preprint; quite the opposite.

Third, our list of recommenders includes numerous associate editors, editors and editors-in-chief of major journals.

Fourth, several journals have chosen to be PCI-friendly.

Fifth, since the creation of PCI, many recommended articles have been published in journals (see example).

PCI-friendly journals have agreed to consider the PCI evaluation in their own evaluation of articles.

• They endorse the PCI review criteria and agree to accept, without further peer review, any manuscript recommended by PCI.
• Or they indicate to the authors, within a very short time frame, whether the article will be peer-reviewed, accepted with no further peer review or rejected.

• If the authors choose to submit their PCI-recommended preprint to a PCI-friendly journal committed to accepting PCI-recommended preprint, the article will be accepted without further peer review, provided that the subject and type of article fall within the scope of the journal. The journal may ask for minor modifications to the format.
• If the authors choose to submit  their PCI-recommended preprint to a PCI-friendly journal committed to providing the authors with a fast answer, they will receive a rapid response, generally within five days, indicating whether the journal is interested, whether additional reviews are needed or whether the article is accepted with minor modifications. Following this response, the authors may decide to withdraw their article and submit it to another journal.
• If the authors choose to submit their article to any other journal, then the journal may or may not use the PCI evaluation.
• The authors can successively submit their PCI-recommended preprint to as many PCI-friendly journals as they choose. They can submit their article to the Peer Community Journal at any time.

Once an article has been recommended by a PCI, the authors can opt to publish it in Peer Community Journal. This journal is run by researchers for researchers and funded by public research institutions. It is:

• Unique = it is a single journal for all PCIs
• Free = it is a diamond open-access journal (free for both authors and readers).
• Exclusive = it publishes only articles recommended by PCI
• Unconditional = it can publish any PCI-recommended preprint in its existing state
• Opt-in = it publishes articles only if the authors wish it
• Immediate = there is no delay between submission and publication
• Community-based

This journal, created and funded by the PCI organisation accepts PCI-recommended preprints without further peer review.

Peer Community Journal is indexed in Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, OpenAlex, Dimensions…. – see all indexations.

The articles published by Peer Community Journal are published under CC-BY license.

The recommendation applies only to a particular version of the preprint, mentioned on the thematic PCI’s website and in the reference list of the recommendation. The version of the article published in the journal should mention the PCI-recommended preprint and the recommendation, usually in the acknowledgments (example) or as a note on the publisher’s webpage (example). We advise the authors to insert a sentence on this subject in the acknowledgments of their article when they submit it to a journal, such as “Preprint version X [replace X by the version number of the recommended preprint] of this article has been peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI X [replace X by the name of the PCI] (DOI [replace DOI by the doi of the recommendation])”.

Yes, every registered user on a PCI website can comment on recommendations. All comments are welcome, provided they deal with science, are signed, and are respectful. Comments considered abusive can be notified to the Managing Board, which may decide to withdraw them.

Yes, every registered user on a PCI website can reply to a comment, provided that the reply deals with science is signed, and is respectful. Comments considered abusive can be notified to the Managing Board, which may decide to withdraw them.

If a reader disagrees with a recommendation or with any comments on an article, they can write a comment. This comment will be published, provided it is signed and respectful. Comments not respecting these rules can be notified to the Managing Board, which may decide to withdraw them.