ULiège supports "Peer Community In"


In Institution Research

The University of Liège is one of the organisations supporting Peer Community In (PCI), a scientific organisation whose aim is to provide scientists with a free, stimulating and transparent means of validating and promoting their scientific production, avoiding the need to submit their articles to traditional scientific journals. A means that allows for a considerable reduction in the costs associated with publication in such journals.

A significant portion of research funding is used nowadays to publish results in scientific journals held by for-profit publishers (subscriptions and article processing fees - APC). To reduce these costs, INRA researchers started up a non-profit scientific organisation in 2016, the Peer Community In (PCI), wishing to provide an alternative solution to researchers in order to promote their scientific production at no cost.

Based on an Open Science editorial process, PCI offers a public recommendation service of high quality preprints deposited in open archives on the basis of peer review and at no charge. The system is fully open (free for readers and free for authors). PCI allows scientific validation of manuscripts, accessible on public servers (in accordance with the principle of Green Open Access > free access for the author and the reader) and the recommendations are also accessible to the reader. Any researcher can submit scientific papers or become a peer-reviewer within one of the PCIs.

The University of Liège, being strongly committed to Open Science , supports this scientific initiative, like many other Belgian and foreign universities.

Nine Peer Community In exist so far

In Practice

Any researcher can submit a preprint. Peer-reviews and recommendations are performed by referees and associate editors called "recommenders". PCI-recommended preprints are high-value, full-length articles that can be cited without the need for publication in traditional scientific journals. PCI also allows the free dissemination of publications through communication tools (social media, web archives). In addition, PCI promotes scientific repeatability (by opening up data, codes and methods, and promoting pre-registrations) in order to improve the overall robustness and integrity of scientific findings (see details on https://peercommunityin.org/2018/12/20/pci-promotes-scientific-repeatability/).

PCI thus offers true free open access, as it allows articles to be published at no cost to authors or readers. The underlying costs are extremely low and are covered by the research institutions.

More info https://peercommunityin.org/

Contact

Paul THIRION - ULiège Library

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Peer Community In. What is it?

The “Peer Community in” (PCI) is a non-profit scientific organization that aims to create specific communities of researchers reviewing and recommending, for free, unpublished preprints in their field (i.e. unpublished articles deposited on open online archives like arXiv and bioRxiv). To a lesser extent, they may also recommend articles already published in journals.

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