Peer Community in (PCI) is a

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

scientific organization that offers an editorial process of

open science Open science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessib ...

by creating specific communities of researchers reviewing and recommending

preprint In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versi ...

s in their field. Since 2021, a new journal, '' Peer Community Journal'', publishes recommended preprints.

General principles

PCI provides scientific validation of manuscripts, accessible in open archives in accordance with the principle of

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

(free access for the author and for the reader), with the recommendations of the experts also being accessible to the reader and citable because they are signed and provided with a

digital object identifier A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; th ...

. As a whole, it is presented like a classic

scientific journal In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, schola ...

, but one that provides more transparent and advanced services, in addition to being free. PCI does not actually publish the scientific articles, so it is not affected by the Ingelfinger rule which regulates the duplication of publications. The same manuscript can therefore be recommended by PCIs from several disciplines, which is useful for promoting interdisciplinary work. The same manuscript can also be recommended by a PCI in the form of a preprint, then published by a classic journal.

Compatibility with traditional publishing

Many scientific journals accept manuscripts previously distributed via preprints. A manuscript recommended by a PCI therefore remains free for later publication in most "classic" scientific journals. Authors who have submitted their manuscript to a PCI and have benefited from an improvement-recommendation cycle generally then choose to submit it for publication in a classic journal. Some journals favor this choice, integrating PCI reviews into their own editorial process if they consider them adequate.

PCI communities

There are different PCI communities for different sub-fields, each community with its own managing board, associate editors and external reviewers. *

Animal Science Animal science is described as "studying the biology of animals that are under the control of humankind". It can also be described as the production and management of farm animals. Historically, the degree was called animal husbandry and the ...

Archaeology Archaeology or archeology is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of Artifact (archaeology), artifacts, architecture, biofact (archaeology), biofacts or ecofacts, ...

* Circuit Neuroscience *

Ecology Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere lev ...

* Ecotoxicology and Environmental Chemistry *

Evolutionary Biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biolo ...

* Forest & Wood Sciences *

Genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, ...

* Infectio

* Computational biology, Mathematical & Computational Biology *
Microbiology
* Network Sciences *
Organization Studies
*

Paleontology Paleontology, also spelled as palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of the life of the past, mainly but not exclusively through the study of fossils. Paleontologists use fossils as a means to classify organisms, measure ge ...

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

* Registered Reports *

Zoology Zoology ( , ) is the scientific study of animals. Its studies include the anatomy, structure, embryology, Biological classification, classification, Ethology, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinction, extinct, and ...

Organization

Peer Community in was founded in 2016 as a non-profit organization under the French law. Founding members Denis Bourguet, Benoit Facon and Thomas Guillemaud are researchers at the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRAE). The organization is an «association loi de 1901» administratively based in

Nice Nice ( ; ) is a city in and the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative city limits, with a population of nearly one million The Association coordinates the creation and activity of the various disciplinary PCI communities. Each community is funded by its own subsidies, which are very modest, as the editorial model does not provide any financial resources for e.g. author's publication costs, readers' consultation costs or subscriptions to their institutional libraries. Each disciplinary PCI is made up of a management board comprising around ten recognized experts in the field, several tens or hundreds of associate editors (“recommenders”), and involves external reviewers.

Recognition

A number of higher education institutions are accepting the students' preprints as equivalent to a publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, when those preprints are available at an open archive (such as

arXiv arXiv (pronounced as "archive"—the X represents the Chi (letter), Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not Scholarly pee ...

bioRxiv bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is an open access preprint repository for the biological sciences co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013. It was hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) until March 11, 2025, whe ...

, etc.) and are recommended by a PCI. The PCI initiative is supported by numerous institutions that value

and bibliodiversity in their practices, such as the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

or the INEE. These institutions commit to: *Consider the PCI system as a legitimate means of evaluating and validating scientific results. * Treat PCI recommended manuscripts in the same way as articles published in traditional scientific journals. * Encourage their members, colleagues and students to integrate PCI into their editorial practices (reading, authoring, expertise). More than 30 academic journals have claimed that they are happy to consider preprints recommended by PCI. The three co-founders of PCI, along with Marjolaine Hamelin who later joined the team, were awarded the LIBER Award for Library Innovation in 2020 for the development of PCI, a free public system for peer-reviewing and highlighting preprints.

Media Coverage

PCI was initially mostly discussed in the French media. It was discussed in ''

Le Monde (; ) is a mass media in France, French daily afternoon list of newspapers in France, newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average print circulation, circulation of 480,000 copies per issue in 2022, including ...

'' as an example of an open-science initiative in scientific publishing. PCI was also described in '' Sciences et Avenir'' as an alternative publishing platform that could be a more efficient use of resources for universities and researchers. As of mid-2020, PCI has attracted much more attention worldwide.

References

{{Reflist Scientific organizations established in 2016