Diversification and Decentralization of Peer Review

MODERATOR: Tony Alves HighWire Press SPEAKERS: Tony Alves Daniela Saderi PREreview Richard Sever Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory REPORTER: Denise Kuo JMIR Publications The speakers collectively presented a vision for transforming scholarly peer review, moving from an historically insular and slow process, which they describe as a conversation between privileged colleagues, to a more open, diverse, and efficient system. The overarching theme is a move toward greater inclusivity, transparency, and adaptability in how scientific knowledge is vetted and shared. Richard Sever’s presentation, “Decoupling Peer Review,” lays the foundational argument for separating the act of disseminating research from its formal evaluation. He critically observes that the traditional model, where peer review precedes publication, introduces delays, often stretching from months to years. This bottleneck impedes the rapid sharing of scientific breakthroughs. Sever introduces preprints as a solution: unpublished manuscripts shared almost immediately, bypassing the sometimes lengthy traditional review process. He traces the origins of this concept to arXiv,1 established in 1991, which pioneered the idea of a nonprofit, open access server for scientific preprints. Building on arXiv’s success, Sever highlighted the emergence of discipline-specific preprint servers, notably bioRxiv2 (2013) for biological sciences and medRxiv3 (2019) for health sciences. The preprint platforms continue to grow, with bioRxiv and medRxiv collectively hosting over 350,000 preprints and attracting approximately 10 million views per month. Crucially, Sever notes that over 80% of these preprints are subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals, indicating their quality and eventual formal validation. The core goals of this “decoupling” are twofold: to […]