Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: from preprint recommendation to diamond open access publication

Peer Community in (PCI) is an alternative to the current costly, non-transparent and non-reproducible publication system. PCI is a non-profit association that creates communities of researchers who evaluate (via peer-reviews) and recommend preprints in their scientific field. Each PCI is a group of several hundred recommenders acting as editors who recommend preprints on the basis of peer-review to make them complete, reliable and citeable articles, without the need to publish them in “traditional” journals (although authors can submit their recommended preprints afterwards). PCI is free of charge to authors and readers. When a recommender recommends a preprint, they write a recommendation text which is published together with all editorial correspondence (reviews, recommender decisions, author responses) on the PCI website. The preprint itself remains on the preprint server where it was posted by the authors and can be submitted to a journal or published in “Peer Community Journal”, a diamond open access journal launched in 2021 that has already published over 360 articles. The first PCI was launched in 2017: PCI Evolutionary Biology and there are now 17 thematic PCIs. More than 2,500 scientists from around the world have already signed up as PCI recommenders. The PCI initiative has won the LIBER 2020 award for innovation in libraries from the European League of Research Libraries and is supported by more than 180 public research institutions such as CNRS, the Harvard Library, The Imperial College, University of Paris-Saclay, Oxford University or INRAE.