 Thank you everyone for coming to this section of how do we go ahead with changing landscape of the publication. So this time it's hosted between me and Ailish who works at Elife and she's a communications manager at Elife. And so we've got three fantastic speakers. First is Anna Akmanova and then we've got Hannah Drury who's product manager at Elife and then we have Daniella Sarderi who's the co-founder and director of Pre-Review. So I'll start by introducing Anna Akmanova. I'm sure if you work in the field of cytoskeleton you know of Anna's work, but I'd emphasize her role in Elife. Anna has been a deputy editor at Elife since 2018. She's currently a professor of cell biology at the Department of Biology at Faculty of Science Utrecht University in Netherlands. She studied biochemistry and molecular biology at Moscow State University, Russia and obtained her PhD from University of Nijmegen if I'm saying it right. Anna just correct me for me. Nijmegen. Okay, Netherlands. So I'm sure she's going to emphasize on things that are intrinsically you know an outcome of the whole preprint culture that has come up in the recent years and how Elife is embracing the new base of doing peer review. Anna, take it over. Thank you. Thank you very much. Simple for the nice introduction. Thank you for joining. So what I would like to do in the coming 10 minutes is tell you a little bit about Elife and mostly about indeed how Elife is embracing the new era of preprints and how we're trying to make preprints more visible and better used in the community and how we are trying to improve the use of the preprints and their usefulness. But let me start by the beginning. So I will start first with Elife. Elife is a journal publishing all across life sciences from medicine to plant sciences from biophysics to cell biology from neuroscience actually to all other areas of life sciences. It has been established in 2012 as a non-profit led by researchers for the benefit of science and scientists and funded by several very prominent funders starting with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Foundation Trust and Max Planck, there was also some additional funding from Wallenberg Foundation since 2018 and research funders provided the strategic guidance and resources to allow researchers to run Elife and the purpose of Elife is to drive reform in research communication. So the idea of Elife is that it is a selective journal which means that we select research that we publish and we publish research that we think is generally interesting and important. It is fully run by scientists so funders provide us some funds but all the running of the journal and all the decisions are taken by scientists. So the current leadership consists of Mike Eisen who is our editor-in-chief and five deputy editors and I'm one of them. I'm representing cell biology and some related areas of biology. We have a very large scientific editorial board which currently includes more than 600 reviewing editors and approximately 80 senior editors and these are the people who actually make decisions who read the papers that are sent to Elife, who select the papers to be published and handle the papers, the peer review process and all the decisions. So just to give you the idea of the size of the journal, we are receiving currently approximately 700 papers a month across all areas of life sciences and we publish approximately 100 papers a month and the percentage of papers that we publish is about 15% of what we receive has been very stable although the journal has been growing. But our main goal is not just to publish papers but to innovate and experiment in scientific publishing and in this way to influence how publishing works across life sciences. Just let me give you a few small examples. So probably one thing that Elife has introduced and that has broadly influenced how journals work these days, at least in life sciences, is consultative peer review. Consultative peer review is a process whereby a paper is reviewed as in all journals by let's say between two and four reviewers but the reviews not just go back to the editor for a decision but first the reviewers and the editor meet virtually in a kind of a chat box and discuss the paper with each other, they know each other's name and they collectively make a decision on whether the paper should be accepted, rejected or revised and most importantly they collectively make a decision on which revisions if the paper is invited for revision are really essential because one of the main goals of starting Elife was to curb the number of revisions and revision cycles that the paper goes through before it's published. So basically these people will be asking each other, okay, John you have asked for this list of revisions but are they really necessary? Do these people really need to make another transgenic plant line or another transgenic plant? Do they need to redo all the other experiments on the new microscope? And very often this discussion amounts to that actually a lot of the requests were kind of good to do but not essential and so in the end people get a single list of requested revisions and in this way so the process is quicker and more organized and also unreasonable requests of reviewers are reduced. So that's one example I gave you of how Elife has broadly influenced how publishing works because many journals have now adopted at least in some way this kind of model. We try to publish papers quickly and we make the decision letter and the author responses also public. But let me now move to what we are doing now. So the biggest change that has occurred in life sciences publishing since the last I would say maybe five years is the adoption and acceptance of preprints. Preprints have been the most normal thing in the world in physics and mathematics for a very long time but not in life sciences. And you can see here so these are statistics for bioarchive. So starting from 2016 the number of preprints have been growing and I can just say for my lab we haven't been publishing preprints like five years ago. Now in my lab it is unthinkable that we would submit a paper without posting a preprint first and this is I know this is the same for a lot of colleagues. Now there have been a lot of reservations about biomedical and particularly medical papers because people were saying yeah if a paper is not reviewed it shouldn't be online if it has medical content because it is dangerous. People will start adopting what is in it and it hasn't seen the light of peer review. But this attitude has been dramatically changed last year and this huge surge in preprinting came because of COVID. When COVID happened there was a huge wave of papers, there was a pandemic I would say of publications being submitted and nobody, no journal could handle them. People wanted to bring them out quickly because that was essential so that the information was disseminated quickly and that's where medical archive that was slowly starting in 2020 suddenly surged. And now preprints are also a big reality in the medical world. Now what are the advantages of preprints? Currently the big preprint servers like BioArchive are for free, your paper if you're supposed it is published within one or two days and it can facilitate progression of career and networking opportunities for early career researchers. For example, most of the people who are now submitting let's say fellowships proposals or go for their first job like a first academic job usually have preprints at the top of their publication list because it takes a while to publish your paper in the journal and you can show that at least you have a paper and everyone can read it. It gives visibility to work, it helps to establish priority and what is very nice, you get feedback so very often you get comments, sometimes formal, sometimes informal from colleagues once you have posted a preprint and what is nice about preprints, they are flexible, you can update them, you can revise them, you can submit different versions of a preprint and in this way your paper becomes a living thing that can gradually improve based on the feedback of your peers. Preprints are broadly adopted by funders starting from very big ones like NIH, Medical Research Council in the UK and also ERC and many others so a lot of funders across the world adopt them. There have been hesitation with adopting preprints in Australia which is of course relevant for you guys but also Australian Research Council has actually changed their policies based probably on the pressure from the research community. Now just to give you an idea of what we are trying to do, so the current publishing system works like this so it starts with sending a paper for peer review and peer reviews are written for editors and authors and after that, so after passing one more or multiple rounds of peer review paper is accepted to a journal and that's a kind of a curation, the paper gets a quality stamp, this is a nature paper, this is a plus one paper or whatever and then the paper is disseminated and published. Now these cycles can take months and sometimes even years. If we would move to the so-called publish review curate system then it will look different because you start with dissemination, you publish the paper as a preprint and the authors decide when they publish, you don't have to wait and then what you could do you could review paper and review it publicly and only after that based on the input maybe from different parties it will be decided okay how important this paper actually is. So you start with a preprint server and then ideally you would have an open and transparent peer review of papers that are freely available that can be discussed by multiple groups and then there would be a round of curation where the value of the paper could be decided by the community. So the advantages of this model is that the authors would control how and when the work is shared and the evaluation of science which is very important is divorced from its publication and because of that it can be richer and more transparent. Let's say that in ideal world if there are no journals and you just have review panels your paper could be reviewed by the review panel of nature and science and eLife and some other journals. So in principle there is no pressure to have just one set of reviewers reviewing your paper and the peer review in this case is not meant to decide whether the paper is placed in a journal or not but to help the authors and to help the readers evaluate what is in the paper and of course if the peer review would be more open and transparent so the quality and the style of peer review would change so because it would need to adapt to the necessities of public discourse and in at the end so if this process evolves it could lead to alternatives to journal titles as the currency for the quality of research and career currency because I think everyone agrees that the current system has big disadvantages. Okay so eLife is trying to make progress towards this vision which we think is the vision for future so our current process is that we only review papers which are posted as a preprint and we produce so because people still need at this moment publication in a journal so we still offer publication in eLife but at the same time we are working towards the new world where the peer review would be happening with a preprint on the preprint server and so we are generating books so we generate public content which includes a public evaluation summary and peer reviews to be posted alongside the preprint and the principle there is that we this is done for the readers so we review the paper as it stands so we try to tell the readers what is in the paper what is good about it and if needed what are the flaws what are the problems with the paper but in a constructive polite and respectful way at the same time we also do what the journal would do we provide constructive feedback to authors private recommendations on how they can improve their paper and we still do consultative peer review and so we also generate in the life decision accept revise or reject and for revised decisions we still come up with a single list on how the authors would need to improve their paper in order to make it acceptable for eLife so the outcome of our process is a short summary which people could in principle use for their grant or job applications saying let's say that's a fantastic paper describing a new method to visualize cells in three dimensions and then there would be public reviews which would provide a balanced overview of the paper and the authors get the possibility to respond if they choose to the to these public comments and then there is a like with any journal in eLife decision and recommendations to authors and for rejected papers we still aim that the public content that we have generated so the evaluation summary and public reviews will be eventually published along the preprint but if the authors cannot proceed with publishing paper in eLife so we can delay the posting of these public reviews until the paper is accepted in another journal so that the possibility for the authors to publish their paper is not damaged by the criticism which is provided in these public reviews so for this new system to work of course we need to work it out we need to make it work well and we need the community to get involved with this and help us to see how we can shape this system better and so now I would like to give the word to I guess Daniela or Hannah who would then continue discussing how we do that thank you thank you very much so next I would like to introduce Hannah Drury and Hannah is the eLife product manager who will present on society a new platform supporting credit sourced organization of the growing preprint literature and we'll discuss how we can enable open evaluation and creation for a positive change in academic publishing perfect thanks Elish and you said my name's Hannah Drury I'm a product manager for eLife and around 18 months ago I was invited to join a cross-functional team and the mantle was kind of handed down to us to build the technology to facilitate this PRC workflow that we've just heard Anna speaking about so by the end of today's panel we'll have heard about the review models and the philosophies of two initiatives eLife and Pre-Review and both of those initiatives are working hard to build the reputation of preprints and I consider society the product to be another cog in that that great machine if you like and it's one that makes the evaluation outputs of eLife Pre-Review and many others more easily discoverable so Anna as I said has already introduced us to the published with new curate model of publication so I won't I won't go into into detail about that again but I did just want to use this this particular pipeline to illustrate exactly where where society fits and that's across these these last two stages the review and curation stages so far we've delegated the publication sites the concerns of publication to you to preprint servers but interestingly as we've progressed in our discovery of the problem space we have become increasingly more aware of the overlap between review and and curation and society really sits at the junction so we know that while the rise in preprint use has been a huge win for science as Anna said it has made it even harder to keep on top of the latest developments in your particular field of expertise there's an overwhelming amount of information available and there's very little to help decide what to pay attention to or where to invest your your limited reading time so society the product it offers the opportunity to contribute to and to benefit from the peer-driven organization of the literature thanks to publicly curated lists and the aggregation of open evaluations from a number of different groups of experts we hope to help you see what your peers find interesting and most importantly to discover your next read so first let's let shine a light on evaluation within society society we only display evaluations from groups of experts so that's that's rather than than individuals and we class a group as being a collection of people who evaluate and curate preprints together that that group may have formed from existing networks or out of a relationship with an organization such as elife and we currently harvest their evaluations from wherever that group has elected to host them so that could be via like hypothesis a custom rss feed or another method for one of our groups we even integrate with a public google sheet preprint evaluations on society take many forms from automated screenings covering reproducibility to the more familiar multi-part review consolidated by a single editor and this is this is exactly why we landed on the word evaluation as a descriptor you'll notice that I haven't haven't been using the word review so far because the term evaluation is is more abstract and we felt that it allowed for a greater scope than the word review which kind of itself it carries a lot of legacy it has a lot of existing existing baggage existing understanding around it but as long as the final output is transparent we're completely agnostic with regards to the process that each group adopts and that allows the reader to to benefit from multiple perspectives the reader and the author to benefit from multiple perspectives while formulating their own opinion of the work and you can just see on this slide I've collated together some of the groups whose evaluations are currently displayed on society journal publication usually relies on one positive consolidated review of a manuscript but but why should this be the case particularly when the entire process commonly takes place behind closed doors and therefore lacks a sense of accountability on society we don't limit the number of evaluations that an article can accumulate meaning that we do have examples on society where more than one group has in fact evaluating the same paper each evaluation is openly available and it's possible for the reader to indicate whether or not they found the comments helpful in their own assessment of the work and this of course allows for voices other than those of journal editors to be heard and authors meanwhile they benefit from receiving feedback early from a number of sources as well as the chance to reach a wider audience with their work that is is publicly available as soon as they themselves deem it ready the events surrounding free prints including evaluations and version history they're presented as a stream of activity alongside the title and abstract and in this way society calls into question the notion that any scientific work is finished at the point of publication post publication review revision and curation mean that a pre-print can continue to evolve as a kind of living document without necessarily completion and at every step of the way that history is completely transparent so we've spoken a little bit about evaluation so what about curation well public creation and management of lists of related preprints is an area that we're currently exploring because we've heard in our user testing how heavily researchers rely on recommendations from trusted individuals or or particular leading lights within their field to match preprints to those who would who would find value in them and we've learned that the group evaluations are the helpful they just aren't enough of a differentiator to to really organize the the preprint literature in a in a meaningful way so this this is what a list currently looks like on society we have plans in the medium term to make them all robust by allowing a curator to customize titles and descriptions as well as add additional comments to accompany each preprint that's added to the list i've said that that society is a tool for for busy researchers but but how does that that work in practice society's unique value lies in the underlying network of evaluation and curation events around preprints that powers our vision of passive discovery if important new preprints are surfaced to you every time you visit society rather than you having to perform the same manual searches over and over again in order to keep on top of the latest developments in your field the first part of this network is the the list of evaluated preprints generated by group activity we've heard and they said that this activity can take many forms for example automated screenings multi-part peer reviews and all of these are aggregated from different sources and they all act as trust indicators that allow readers to make informed decisions about the content users can then elect to follow particular groups that are evaluating preprints in their area of expertise and this means that new evaluations from those groups are going to be pushed under your radar with with every return visit to society once you've found a preprint of interest you can save it to your reading list so you can easily come back to it later and that list itself is also publicly available which means it can be used to benefit others such as your such as your own lab and we've seen examples of labs sharing this in preprints with each other in this way I say you can indicate if you found a particular group evaluation helpful and this provides a simple way of demonstrating for those groups what what a good public review looks like at the moment the the network is limited by the number of curation and evaluation activities an individual or group can perform but we do have big plans moving forward I just wanted to cover just just a few of those as we finish off this morning as we layer on top more robust individual curation in other words the the highlighting of particularly significant preprints in public lists we see that the network starts to develop even more links you might consider this activity a form of light curation sorry a form of light evaluation particularly if we consider the possibility of custom names and descriptions of these lists if if a preprint appears in a list entitled top top neuroscience papers of 2021 then if you're a neuroscientist that that paper may be something that you want to pay particular attention to what about groups that are both evaluating and curating well groups of course they they should be able to collect together lists of preprints to reflect for example papers that they've found particularly groundbreaking while they've been evaluating them or papers that they're considering for a review but they haven't got around to yet and that might help that group's particular followers to stay ahead of the game and it's really in bringing all of these activities together and using them to start linking relevant preprints with those who have most benefit from reading them that that size you really does begin to become valuable as you as a user follow groups people and lists and society begins to surface in highlight more and more of the preprints that matter to you and in turn you're encouraged to save these preprints to your own public lists making even more links in the network so just finishing up we're developing society completely in the open and we rely on feedback from users to help determine how we can best achieve our aims while solving problems for for you as scientists and with that in mind I would I'd encourage you to take a look at the application today you can find us at sciety.org and to sign up to our mailing list which will help you keep abreast of the latest updates you can find us on on Twitter and Facebook at SciTHQ as well and thank you very much I look forward to to any discussion thank you very much Tana and with that I now I'd like to introduce Daniella Sidiri Daniella holds a PhD in neuroscience she is a former Mozilla fellow for science and co-founder and director of pre-review Daniella will now discuss pre-review and how we can empower the next generation of peer reviewers thank you so much Elish for the introduction and Anna and Hannah for your wonderful talks this preceded me and also the Monash universities and Senzil for embodying me okay let's get to it first I just want to mention that these slides are available and they can be used and reused under CC buy 4.0 at pre-review dash Monash and the bit.ly link so you're welcome to go there I don't mean for the introduction of myself except that you might realize from my accent that I'm actually Italian but I am talking to you from Portland Oregon in the United States you're welcome if anyone is on Twitter to anything that I say even though it's 11 p.m. I'm not sure you really want to to tweet it a new Rosada or a true review underscore everything that I'm going to tell you about today about our work at pre-review is not just me but it's also the hard work of the rest of the leadership team including Dr. Monica Granados Samantha Hendo and also Katrina Murphy and Antonette Foster who have joined us at different times helping us with the with this project so and we heard a lot about the the wonderful work that elive and anxiety are doing into bringing this new model of peer review to scholarly communication we start always with like what are what are the the driving problems that we see in in the peer review system and how are we trying to to address it so before I even tell you about what peer review is I just wanted to just briefly mention what are the the drivers of our work and so we definitely see as we are not a general but as an independent organization that we've you know and of researchers ourselves the pool reviewers is small and that many editors we've talked to often have complained about insufficient number of reviewers and the review requests especially in during COVID times and the composition of this reviewer pool is very homogeneous very often times even though it can be difficult to quantify with a blind process but if you look at the editorial pool tends to be very homogeneous and also selected quite often in you know quite opaque way and these reviewers are obviously selected as experts in the field and yet there is not a universal training that we as researchers receive at any point in our career at least not in the program and that I've been through in how to do a peer review and so it's this assumption that we are experts just because we we know about our research but like we believe the peer review is more than the privilege or and practice or or years of experience in your own in your own field of research and also these reviews and all this time it goes often unrecognized so a peer review we started in 2017 with this idea of really trying to bring together researchers and kind of re-empower with the power that we already have of being the center of peer review and the center of evaluations and really bring that peer back to the peer review world and as we grew and kind of developed what we wanted to do we're still a very small organization we really decided and thought deeply about wanting to truly bring openness to the scholarly peer review process but also center in this process equity in the sense of like really recognizing who are the groups that are left behind and very often in this process of scholarly communications and in academia and put the the the needs of researchers at the center so the the work that we do and I apologize if I'm rambling a little bit it's a little late but the the center of the work we do it can be thought about around three pillars as we call them and so we bring community together through training programs and so this is a kind of a to in response to the need of the lack of of training that we have seen as researchers of ourselves I'm also talking to researchers around the world and I'm going to tell you a little bit about them during this presentation we also organize a collaborative sessions of when we basically bring researchers from all over the world to review a prep print together during an hour an hour and a half of a facilitated call and then we use the fruits of the discussion to compose a review and share it with the authors and often also share it openly online in the platform that we have been developing for the past four years now the platform is an open source and it's an open infrastructure but really what we're trying to do with the platform is to create a home for the communities that we want to see thrive and develop around open prep print review and the one of the main questions that we asked ourselves as not a software developers or the diners but it was really trying to understand who are we why if we're trying to embark in this was 2017 of designing a platform to allow anyone to review prep prints what are the the issues that we're trying to solve and what are the the shared values of the of the researchers and the people that really we expect to come and collaborate on a prep print review and and one of the key issues that we couldn't turn our definitely our our back to is that we really wanted to to center this idea of like using an equity lens to to kind of build this this new community of prep print reviewers and not shy away from the recognitions that a lot of oftentimes a lot of new projects even if they're developed in the open they try it tends to not recognize some of the issues that have been already existing in previous processes and they try to be reproduced in the open and this is not nobody's fault it's just the way that we are bring our own biases and when our own thoughts and experiences to even be idea creation and so we've been trying to be of course with a not not being perfect but trying to be very open and did a lot of interviews and one-on-one with many researchers and we still try to approach partnerships from is a point of view of like opportunity and creating collaboration so I'm gonna I don't have a lot of time to explain a lot of the to show a lot of the features that are in the platform but I just want to highlight some of the main ones this is a screenshot of them just a front page of the of the pre-review platform and the the key element here is that we're not a pre-print server we do not host pre-print very similar to what sci-ad we live that to the to the great work that many pre-print servers are doing but what the opportunity here is for anyone with an orchid ID to provide a review of of a pre-print that has a DOI in this case the first one that comes up here is a med archive pre-print that had six what we call rapid reviews and I'm going to tell you in a minute what they are and also this request for review so a user can also we like to call them pre-reviewers as the opportunity to request reviews so that others can recognize that request and possibly address it if they have the time the the two kind of reviews that can be done on their own pre-reviews are a rapid questionnaire that can be filled up with very potentially very very quickly if someone has obviously read the pre-print and and these questions have been really designed to capture the essence of the pre-print and then if the pre-reviewer has more time or if they are reviewing they're printing in a group for example this was a review that was written by six different people that were together doing one of those collective collaborative reviews process that I told you about excuse me then you can write what we call full pre-review so that is just free text that can that is then published and gets a DOI via Venodo they one of the main responses in terms of like wanting to open up a peer review and and do this in the open is that we cannot assume that we can do that without thinking about this opening up to vulnerable communities and as an early career researcher myself when we started this I was still a PhD student I remember my first posting I was incredibly scared and so I even though I knew that I didn't want to continue in academia I remember really like we need to provide a way to be anonymous but we also need to provide a way for someone to be accountable for the comments and the activity they may have in a public platform so we came up with this kind of idea where every peer reviewer gets two different personas at the login and one is a public associated with your orchid ID and your list of publications is and anything that is public or orchid gets important in your profile so you can keep track and with this idea that eventually you know there is going to be more and more recognition of contributions to peer review that researchers can use to advance in their career but also this possibility of posting a review and a comment as anonymously with it's a pseudonym that gets associated to your profile when you create it and so what that allows is that by using the pseudonym you can still contribute you can still share your profile with a third party that you trust and but you if there is a violation of the conduct that is reported by the by other peer reviewers by other community members then the accountability element is still there as the pseudonym is associated with the public profile on our end so there is that element so far we have not had that problem but we wanted to make sure that we can create a space that would feel safe and not just a place where everybody can just feel I can then judge in the way that they want and so here is where I think you know that the platform was something that honestly like funders were very interested in and we were interested in creating this home for a community that wasn't still there but my heart and our heart especially in the work that we've been doing with eLife in the past year has been really trying to also advance this process of training and creating mentorship opportunity for researchers and so eLife was the the major sponsor of our pilot open reviewers program that went on in the fall of 2020 and this was a cohort based training program in which we paired early credit researchers with little to no experience in peer review with journal editors who volunteered to be mentors and the opportunity here was not only to be mentor 101 but also to have a peer to peer learning that would happen every week and kind of building the the skills and the confidence in the early credit researchers in being them coming back to the program if they wanted to as mentors themselves and we intentionally integrated in the educational focus on like exposing like problems that we see at the structural level of our society and also how do we we see the repercussion of that into our systems and even the peer review process and trying to figure out how can we assess our own biases as peer reviewers and then address it at the same time so some of the the work that came out and the resources that we created particularly Dr. Antoinette Foster was here was a key for this we published what we call the reviewer guide and this is just a very detailed step-by-step review guide that can allow a researcher that has not much experience to to do their first review and be guided through it and here I just wanted to highlight that after many iterations even when the pilot early credit researchers giving us feedback we recognize that really this process starts and ends with a self-reflection and with assessment of our own checking our own biases and how they come in and it's so so interesting to see how when we have those collective and collaborative sessions a lot of of us and researchers like realize things that they have not perhaps seen until it was come and talked through so there is this really important part that we think can come from having collaborative review discussions this is just the part of the reflection guide that we also published and it's just a process that we believe is helpful to go through but I don't have obviously time right now to to go through this but I just wanted to show it so that if this is of any interest to you these are all available openly on Zenodo and their open licenses and there are these three guides guides that we we want to iterate upon with researchers so if these are of any use please check them out and the links are in the presentation the last thing and I think I'm taking way too much time now that I'm seeing the time so I apologize for that but I wanted to bring up some of the opportunities that we have been working with especially with the life and so those are basically re-adapting the content of the reviewers in the training to a workshop type but also working in partnership with other organizations that are actually doing the work in their own communities such as Africa Archive, DCC Africa, and Aether Africa to adapt the context of this training and to the context of the research communities in Africa and develop a model that can allow the amplification of this without having us or someone specifically to be there but could be like just openly propagated and so I will move on because I am way too sleepy and probably took way too much time the last part was just sharing opportunities with you the only thing that I want to mention is that we are hiring for a specific job to help us adapt to open reviewers to actually grant reviewing so if you're interested please check out the job and apply and I want to thank you for your attention and I apologize for taking way too long thank you absolutely no problem Daniela that's fantastic thank you everyone for their presentations we can take some questions um Harry would you like to go ahead and ask your question hello um yeah so my question was regarding um society and how the actual commenting forms work with regards to the groups um how does a group form can any group of researchers form one and is it possible to comment and start a dialogue around these preprints without belonging having an affiliation to any of these groups uh hi Harrison thanks thanks for your question um so at the moment the formation of those groups has been quite manual um we've in some instances we've reached out to to groups in other instances we've been contacted by groups um and we've kind of worked with them to onboard them um into the into the society network um the reason why we elected to only allow evaluations from groups rather than from from individuals without without a kind of a group affiliation as you say um a lot of it um was for exactly the same reasoning that Daniela's pre-review platform allows for anonymized reviewing um is that we found that for us groups was a good way of kind of maintaining well there were two reasons really one of which was that the groups were a good way of maintaining protection for um particularly vulnerable um reviewers they're able to to participate um in in this process without needing to associate their own identity their own names um and secondly that the groups the groups really take on the mantle of the accountability um and the vetting for their for their own evaluators so the society itself we we can kind of abstain from that it's it's the group's responsibility to make sure that the the quality of of their evaluations is is high um and the people that that are evaluating them you know they're they're qualified they're their experts in the field um every group has its own uh home page on society its own kind of landing page and we use those pages to be completely transparent about each each group's process we are we're working towards including the the ASAP bio taxonomy so ASAP bio has developed a taxonomy for um outlining a particular review process so that's everything from kind of the number of people that are involved in the review um whether they're they're blind to the authors whether the authors are blind to them um and that transparency is is really so that the the reader of that group's evaluations can make up their mind as to you know how much weight to to give give that group's opinions of a particular pre-print um in terms of as I say for me a group um really these these groups are are coming from anywhere um at the moment we have you know big organizations such as such as eLife but we have kind of much much smaller organizations um and you know there's there's also the opportunity for for labs for example to to get involved um but yeah please if if you're if you're part of a group um that you think could could fit that remit then please do please do get in touch and and we can work with you to you can you can review through preview and then it will be a group on society yeah perfect because that's something that I was going to sort of ask that is there any plan to have um a society hosted group or are there enough groups forming you think that um that there will be enough groups organically for people to be able to join and to become sort of part of and rather than take that mantle of accountability as you talked about um on to society itself we um so at the moment we don't have any any plans for for society society created groups um but that's not to say that that we're completely ruling that out out of the future um the best way for as as Danny says the best way for for particular individuals to get involved right now would be um to to review via pre-review um and then pre-review preview then kind of takes on that that accountability um and the the kind of the umbrella umbrella protection for you know for particularly vulnerable um reviewers early career researchers in particular those from you know the global south minority groups the kind of thing not just a pre-review there are other great groups so pre-lites and pre-communities they have different ways of doing it but um sorry just wanted to not just say the best way is to do pre-review but that's anyway thank you though Anna for the trust thank you for those answers and thank you for the great talks thanks Anna um I have got a question for Anna so this published review curate model so what does elife review rely on for reviews does it rely on multiple sorts like sci-fi, pre-review, pre-lites or does it have a favorite choice or how does this various platform come into the picture for elife at the moment the platforms are kind of parallel to elife so we still just run our conventional reviewer process and we see how we can plug in the reviews we generate for elife on the platforms but at the moment we are just running our own peer review process which we are running the same way I've always been doing it so there is a reviewing editor who selects reviewers invites them and then they generate peer reviews so our emphasis inside elife itself at the moment is to make those reviews suitable for public consumption which means that once the reviewers have submitted the reviews we will often go back to them and say hey this is not written in a language that would be entirely appropriate for public posting can you soften it a bit or can you be a bit more clear on it so that because your review is really written for insiders there is too much slang in it so please make it a little bit more useful for the readers and not just for the authors and editors of the paper but we are just working what we are doing is working inside the life so of course the idea would be to interact with these platforms but the whole process is new so we only introduced it in 2021 so that's like this year and I must say that a lot of reviewers we have very clear instructions on what we want the reviewers to produce but as you probably know people tend not to read any instructions so we have to still to work out how to do this better and then I think we can converge more with the platforms so this is the plan right so my next question is between elife, site and preview you've got a very concerted aim to put the reviewers in public and make it more equitable etc but there is this other market of big journals which have their own traditional processes so how what's the strategy or do you have a strategy to sort of combat that or operate in parallel and gain prominence in future? I think we have to gain prominence we have to gain popularity and then the big journals will follow so what I see that I mean think about nature like six years ago the embargo at nature was the biggest thing ever asked so if you were submitting your paper to nature you were not supposed to talk about and then on the same date was published and you were allowed to talk to the journals now all the papers that you submit to nature can be pre-printed which means that everybody can read them on average one year before nature will publish them so this is a huge change for a magazine like nature because they lost one of the most essential assets the novelty the like the primary novelty of what they are publishing so because now you see oh yeah good for these guys I read this pre-print like a year ago was very cool pre-print got that they got the pen nature so they got the curation statement from nature you don't even go and read the paper anymore because you have discussed it on your journal club like eight months earlier so this is a huge shift I mean and so this shows that the community can vote with its feet and lead the way so that in the end the big publishers they are interested in making profits so they will follow what the community wants so if we manage to introduce something that is popular with the community they will follow the same was with consultative peer review I mean I have been dealing with digital biology a lot in my life so it used to be like three huge reviews from reviewers and then the editor throws it at you and say do every single thing now after we have introduced consultative peer review they change that so the editor would really read the comments say okay please do the comment of review one and the comment five of review two so they change that so again I mean the big journals I don't think that they are very innovative in what they are doing but if we can innovate and the community can say yeah this is a good thing for us they will follow because they what they want is not to lose the community right yeah that's very true it's a great example with the embargo so are there other more journals than e-life that have signed up for this kind of process or is e-life the only journal that's leading the way here you mean for the preprints so for example the review comments which has been set up by embo publishing groups so they have also in principle they are interested in promoting preprints and also making reviews public and all the big publishing houses now do have preprint servers so that's also a big change so there is this I remember both nature and Elsevier have a preprint server they don't publish reviews there but maybe if they see that this is an advantage they will follow so and in principle there are more platforms and more initiatives for publicly reviewing preprints especially COVID has stimulated this very strongly so I don't know I cannot say the exact names but there are quite a few organizations maybe Hanna or Daniela would know who are actually trying to see how preprints can be reviewed publicly so that there is a general demand for that which was greatly heightened by COVID all right thank you Anna if there are more questions please use the recent functions and I can call out your name so is society and preview are sort of similar and dissimilar in the way that you know society works on groups and preview is individual based yeah I didn't get the chance to talk about communities but go ahead right so does preview also have communities in in itself building up or well we're just starting an hour you know there it's just a very very early stages but the it is individuals and you know the the full preview can actually be authored by multiple authors at the same time and this was specifically developed to thinking about like the experience of a live stream preparation club so these like community reviews and the the thing that we launched more recently are just preview communities and it's still like all of the software needs a lot of support but the idea is to also create so an experience for the reader so that filters can happen across like reprint and reviews more around like a group that has developed their own trust within that the preview group rather than you know selecting a reviewer and only reading reviews from this particular person that may have whose name might be just like kind of highlighted for because they're popular on Twitter or things like that so kind of similar approach in the line and what I'm hoping that it's going to happen more and more as we kind of continue working together is that these different groups and communities that can grow on on pre-review then are actually separately streamed to sci-fi so that they can be followed because they actually create around different identities and around different experiences and different topics but that's not yet happening yeah so at the moment at the moment we kind of everything that's coming out of pre-review is being displayed in within sci-fi under the pre-review banner but it'd be great you know if we could kind of start separating these out I think the more options that there are available for people to kind of turn to and use the better I see all of these initiatives as living kind of side by side and and just you know moving forward into the brave new world together sure yeah yeah sounds very exciting I mean I guess it's all too early and all too new but but the change is important it's all coming through I see no more questions and I know all of you have either gotten up at weird times or staying up late so I'll let you guys go thank you very much again for accommodating the time zones and giving these fantastic presentations and putting forward all the new things to come to us thank you very much thank you for having for having me and us yeah thank you very much thank you thank you bye bye