First, the Preprint Club should have a cross-institutional format, ideally involving participants from different countries to broaden expertise and reduce bias. We had three core ideas for the Preprint Club. A case for community-based preprint clubs We harnessed this lost opportunity to repurpose our institutional journal clubs to focus on preprints that have not yet been peer reviewed, and to share our analyses publicly. Unfortunately, these efforts are often limited to discussing peer-reviewed manuscripts, and the analyses are rarely shared beyond the journal clubs. The Preprint Club builds on the fact that most academic institutions host journal clubs at which ECRs already spend time and energy reading and commenting on the work of others. Strife at eLife: inside a journal’s quest to upend science publishing This led to the creation of the Preprint Club in 2020, and two other institutions, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the University of Toronto in Canada, subsequently joined. Together, we established a cross-institutional journal club to evaluate emerging immunology studies that are posted before peer review. The enthusiasm for this community-centred peer-review approach encouraged us to expand it after the pandemic.
We made our assessments publicly available in the comment sections under each preprint on the bioRxiv and medRxiv platforms to help researchers to contextualize this unprecedented flow of scientific data. For this reason, we - ECRs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and the University of Oxford, UK - independently began to critically read and analyse many COVID-19-related preprints. This wave of non-peer-reviewed studies presented an opportunity and a necessity to explore alternative ways to conduct peer review. During the pandemic, immunologists took advantage of preprint servers to rapidly communicate their research findings. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a seismic shift in the way research studies are shared. Unsurprisingly, recent years have seen the emergence of alternative publishing approaches that aim to address some of these limitations, such as the peer-review platform Review Commons 2 and the switch last year in the journal eLife’s editorial process and publishing model 3. It can often feel as if the current peer-review model is reaching its limits. Papers are increasing in volume, complexity and interdisciplinarity, which means that the pool of available and qualified reviewers is becoming ever more shallow. The confidential nature of peer review also makes it challenging to evaluate and reform the process. Opponents counter that the current process is based on repeated cycles of submission and rejection, which is time-consuming, expensive, lacks evidence of its efficacy and might hinder scientific progress 1. Supporters argue that peer review identifies errors, biases and misinterpretations. However, in recent years, its usefulness and relevance have been hotly debated. The peer-review process is often touted as a key arbiter of academic rigour - a means of ensuring that sub-par research doesn’t slip through the net.
The decisions of these few, often-anonymous individuals have far-reaching effects on career progression, funding opportunities and reputations, both inside and outside the scientific community. By pursuing careers in academia, we agreed to subject ourselves to the scrutiny of fellow experts in our field, who evaluate the quality of our research and grant proposals. Credit: fizkes/GettyĪs early-career researchers (ECRs), we have experienced at first hand the challenges and consequences of navigating the peer-review system. Preprint clubs provide a training ground for early-career researchers to develop their peer-review skills.
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