We are pleased to announce the launch of the Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology (PCI Evol Biol) website: https://evolbiol.peercommunityin.org.
This website will host free, open and transparent reviews and recommendations of preprint (i.e. prereview) articles deposited in open archives, such as bioRxiv (biorxiv.org) as well as recommendations of postprint (i.e. reviewed) articles. Several recommendations for postprint articles are already available on the home page of the website.
We warmly invite you to submit your preprint articles to PCI Evol Biol for evaluation and recommendation by this community.
PCI Evol Biol is currently supported by more than 160 researchers (evolbiol.peercommunityin.org/public/recommenders) and we expect to be joined by many more.
Details about the aims, structure and functioning of PCI Evol Biol can be found on the websitehelp page (evolbiol.peercommunityin.org/about/help_generic).
Briefly, PCI Evol Biol is the first community of the parent project Peer Community In (peercommunityin.org). The Peer Community In project is driven by a desire to establish a high-quality, free, public system for identifying high-quality articles through specific recommendations recognized initially within, and subsequently beyond the community, including by funding and research agencies. This recommendation system will offer a free alternative to all those uncomfortable with the current evaluation and editing process of scientific journals, which is very costly for research institutions.
Using PCI Evol Biol as an example, we will call for the establishment of other specific communities of researchers (e.g. PCI Ecology, PCI Entomology) reviewing and recommending articles in their fields. In the long term, this project could, therefore, lead to the development of an entirely new system of scientific publication, in which articles are deposited in free open archives, and, if appropriate, are reviewed and awarded a recommendation providing a public guarantee of their scientific quality.
We hope you will appreciate this project and will provide it with your support, by submitting preprints of high quality. Please tell your colleagues all about PCI Evol Biol and its website.
Thomas Guillemaud, Benoit Facon, Denis Bourguet and the Managing Board of PCI Evol Biol.
