Biophysics Colab shifting to full ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ service for authors

"Biophysics Colab is pleased to announce that it will shift to a full ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ (PRC) model later this year. Their expanded service will provide authors with an alternative option to traditional journals for the review and dissemination of their work.​ Biophysics Colab is an international collaboration of biophysicists working to improve the way original research is evaluated. The group has been running a preprint review trial since 2019, which has proved popular among authors due to its service-oriented approach that focuses wholly on authors’ best interests. Now, Biophysics Colab is building upon this service by giving authors the option to create a final ‘version of record’ – equivalent to a journal article – after peer review of their preprint. This curation step will complete Biophysics Colab’s vision of a community-run PRC service, originally inspired by a proposal from Stern and O’Shea*.... Biophysics Colab is the first endeavour of the open science publishing initiative, Science Colab – a non-profit, community-run project supported by eLife, with a mission to add value and credibility to the scientific literature in a way that supports and benefits the community. Both Science Colab and the non-profit eLife share a similar vision of a publishing ecosystem in which the significance of research is recognised independently of journal title.... The collaboratory will soon begin to formally validate reviewed preprints as versions of record – a citable record of the final version of the work. However, authors submitting preprints to Biophysics Colab will remain in control of their study, choosing when to declare it as final. This reflects eLife’s new publishing model and makes Biophysics Colab the first group to adopt a flavour of it...."