Transforming scholarly publishing through the Publish, Review, Curate model – COAR

"On October 29-30, 2024, COAR organised a strategic meeting to discuss how to accelerate the adoption of the Publish, Review, Curate model of scholarly publishing. The meeting was part of the COAR Notify Project and was hosted by the CCSD (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) in Lyon, France....

PRC challenges the status quo of scholarly publishing, which is based on selectivity, with binary and opaque accept or reject decisions. However, the current conditions are extremely favourable for PRC initiatives to become more widely adopted. According to a recent study by cOAlition S there is a growing level of acceptance by researchers of preprint sharing and open peer reviews. These findings are reinforced by the experience of other research organisations such as HHMI, with nearly half of their 2023 papers appearing first as a preprint. There is also an increasingly friendly policy environment, with more funders encouraging preprint sharing and some, like the Gates Foundation, requiring it. This is coupled with significant momentum behind research assessment reform, moving the community away from traditional measures based on the publishing venue, rather than the real quality and impact of the article. The COAR Notify protocol, which allows PRC services and preprint repositories to exchange messages in a standardised way, will greatly help PRC scale more quickly and easily.

In a climate where the scholarly community is increasingly looking for alternatives to the predominant commercial system that is expensive, opaque, and slow, the Publish, Review, Curate approach offers a very promising alternative...."