Publish in Peer Community Journal

The editorial board consists of the members of the managing boards of each thematic PCIs.

The journal has an executive board. Its members manage the logistics, funding, administrative aspects and promotion of the journal. The members of the executive board are the members of the board of the PCI organisation that publishes the journal.

This journal is created and funded by the PCI organisation. 

The official publisher of Peer Community Journal is the PCI organisation.

For more information, read the statutes of the PCI organisation.

This journal is original in that:

• It is free (diamond open access) for authors and readers,
• It is multidisciplinary, and will accept for publication any articles recommended by any of the PCIs (PCI Ecology, PCI Paleontology, PCI Mathematical & Computational Biology, etc., https://peercommunityin.org/current-pcis/),
• It is based on a transparent editorial process (PCI publishes reviews and all editorial processes of accepted articles),
• It provides an example of dissociation of the three stages of publication (the Publish-Review-Curate model): publication of a preprint in a preprint server or open repository, peer review via PCI, and publication by a journal.
• It unites the entire PCI community around a single journal.

Because authors may think the service PCI provides is not complete:

– Lack of visibility: Preprints recommended by PCI do not appear as recommended in the results provided by search engines.

– Lack of indexation: Preprints recommended by PCI are not indexed in the best-known databases (WoS, PubMed, Scopus, DOAJ) because preprints are not articles published in journals.

→ We will continue our efforts to have PCI-recommended preprints recognised as articles of high quality that do not need to be published in journals.

While awaiting this recognition (which will necessarily take time), Peer Community Journal will provide a means of publishing any PCI-recommended preprint without further modification and at no cost to the authors.

PCI’s goal is to promote preprints and recommended preprints and to ensure their recognition with a value equivalent to that of the best articles published in journals. However, most authors currently need to publish in journals (for evaluation, visibility, and indexation) and this requirement is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Whilst it remains the rule to publish articles in journals, PCI will run Peer Community Journal to offer authors this option.

We hope that, in the long term, Peer Community Journal (and PCI-friendly journals) will create a large flow of submissions to PCI, leading to a situation in which it will be sufficient for authors to have PCI-recommended articles. Until then, PCI will continue to promote recommended articles.

No. The non-use of citation metrics is a condition laid down in the statutes of the PCI organisation, which is the publisher and owner of Peer Community Journal.

No, there is room for everyone. PCI-friendly journals are long-term established journals, with specific editorial policies and with specific communities of researchers seeking to publish in them. A scientist accustomed to publishing in a learned society journal, for example, may well continue to submit to this journal as a first choice. Peer Community Journal has been created to ensure that the authors of PCI-recommended preprints can publish their articles in a journal, without the possibility of refusal or time delay.

Yes, the authors of PCI-recommended articles can do whatever they want with their articles: leave them on preprint servers, submit them to Peer Community Journal, a PCI-friendly journal, or any other journal.

Yes. Funding from public research institutions is available to ensure the journal’s continued operation for at least the next 10 to 15 years.