Supporting preprint evaluation: accessing preprint peer reviews with Europe PMC

This is a presentation for Workshop on Open Citations & Open Scholarly Metadata 2023.

Preprinting is a method to share research results quickly and openly to a wide audience. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) highlights " the recognition of preprints offers value to early career researchers, whose career progression and ability to obtain funding may be negatively impacted by the extended review time and multiple rejections typical of journal publications''. However, despite changing policies of institutions and funders to encourage or require them, lack of trust in preprints as non-peer reviewed outputs remains. Peer review is also occurring on preprints, but peer reviews are often hosted on alternative platforms to the preprints themselves and the association between them requires wider scale integration to improve discoverability and thus use for research assessment purposes. 

Europe PMC is a life sciences literature database that indexes preprints since 2018. Europe PMC provides access to over half a million preprint abstracts and over 47 thousand full text preprints from over 30 different preprint servers. Europe PMC is now developing open source software to improve the linking of peer reviews on 3rd party platforms with preprints indexed in Europe PMC and further assist in discoverability of associated peer review of this content. Collaborating with Sciety and Review Commons, Europe PMC is utilising the DocMaps infrastructure to index links to preprint peer reviews and associated metadata.