Peer Community In: A free and transparent initiative for preprint peer-reviewing

As the issues with classic for-profit publishing system continue to grow, the Peer Community In non-profit organization was created in 2016 to gather communities of researchers offering peer review, recommendation and publication of scientific articles in open access for free. Following submission by authors, the thematic PCIs evaluate preprints in their scientific fields based on rigorous and transparent peer review. After evaluation, the PCIs may recommend those preprints, to make them complete, reliable and citable articles, without the need for publication in ‘traditional’ journals. Authors who need to publish their article in a journal can publish it for free in Peer Community Journal or submit it to a PCI-friendly or other journal. Currently 18 thematic PCIs exist and are entitled Peer Community in X, e.g. – Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology, the first one, or Peer Community in Archaeology, which I founded in 2020. The recommendation of an article is a positive editorial decision made by a recommender based on at least two rigorous peer reviews and after one or several rounds of peer reviews. The recommendations are published in the corresponding thematic PCI websites with a DOI and can be cited. Once recommended by PCI, articles become citable valid references, similar to journal articles, but they can still be submitted to a journal or directly published in the Peer Community Journal.