PREreview Annual Report 2023

PREreview works to bring more equity and transparency to scholarly peer review by supporting and empowering communities of researchers, particularly those at early stages of their career (ECRs) and who have been historically excluded, to review preprints in a process that is rewarding to them. The year 2023 stands out as a transformative period for us, defined by three pivotal elements: reflection, radical listening, and rebuilding. With two new passionate individuals joining our team, we knew we needed time to re-evaluate and re-align our work around our shared values. We also knew we needed to press pause on some initiatives and product features to reassess their scope with input and feedback from our community. We built our annual strategic approach to advance our mission around three key objectives: Establish processes for community input into programming, product, and governance. Towards this objective, we dedicated ourselves to actively seeking diverse perspectives and understanding the needs and aspirations of those we serve. Through community sprints, surveys, and one-on-one interactions, we embraced the richness of varied voices, fostering a culture where every opinion is valued. Towards the end of the year, we began a consultation process with Dr. Kari Jordan and Tara Robertson that will carry over to 2024 to help us strengthen our governance and decision-making processes. Increase global engagement with PREreview. Toward this goal, we set up a new bi-monthly newsletter, enhanced our social media presence, and created a new Community Slack workspace. In 2023 we also expanded our engagement efforts in providing training in conducting constructive and socially conscious peer review, running a combined 12 Open Reviewer and Open Grant Reviewer workshops training over 250 reviewers in collaboration with 8 partner organizations. Our free community workshops and new equitable pricing model for training will hopefully enable us to reach even more communities of researchers around the globe in 2024.  Integrate PREreview workflows within the open publishing ecosystem. Toward this goal, we collaborated with Current Research in Neurobiology (CRNEUR) to pilot a new community-based review method and will write up the results early next year. Our re-launched PREreview Clubs have got off to a flying start on publishing open, collaborative preprint peer reviews. We also recently launched our request-a-review feature using COAR Notify to connect preprint authors posting with bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints with our PREreview community members. We are excited to continue this work in 2024 and share more about our progress soon.  In our first-ever Annual Report, you can find more about what PREreview has done since its formal inception in 2018, our main 2023 achievements, and our team.