Peer Community In: A free alternative to evaluate, validate (and publish?) preprints
Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud
French National Research Institute of Agronomy and Environment (INRAE), and Peer Community In
The Peer Community in (PCI, https://peercommunityin.org) project offers an alternative to the current system of publication - which is particularly expensive and not transparent. PCI is a non-profit scientific organization building communities of researchers handling the evaluation of (through peer review) and recommending preprints in their scientific field. Each PCI is a group of several hundred recommenders playing the role of editors who recommend such preprints based on peer-reviews to make them complete, reliable and citable articles, without the need for publication in ‘traditional’ journals (although the authors can submit their recommended preprints afterwards). Evaluations and recommendations by a PCI are free of charge. When a recommender decides to recommend a preprint, they write a recommendation text that is published along with all the editorial correspondence (reviews, recommender's decisions, authors’ replies) by PCI. The preprint itself is not published by PCI: it remains in the preprint server where it has been posted by the authors and can therefore be submitted to a journal and publish in Peer Community Journal, an open access diamond journal that PCI will launch, this fall. The first Peer Community in has been launched in 2017: Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology (PCI Evol Biol). PCI genomics was created two years ago. More than 1200 recommenders have already joined PCI Evol Biol, PCI Genomics, PCI Paleontology, PCI Ecology, PCI Animal Science, PCI Zoology, PCI Mathematical and Computational Biology, PCI Archaeology, etc. PCI won the 2020 LIBER award for library innovation of the European League of Research Libraries.
Thursday, November 16, 2021, at 12h00-13h00 (Lisbon, Portugal time)
Zoom: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/86514820582
Short biography of Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud:
Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud are senior scientists at the French National Institute for Research in Agronomy and environment (INRAE). Denis works in Montpellier, France and Thomas Guillemaud in Sophia Antipolis and Nice, France, in various aspects of evolutionary biology (Pesticide resistance evolution for both of them, invasion biolgy for TG). They co-founded PCI in late 2016 and co-manage PCI since then.
