“Peer Community In” is the future of science: Empowering authors and community with moving to diamond open access and community initiatives
organized by University Libraries
Viewed by HKU and Public
Event Type: Conference/Forum/Public Lecture/Seminar/Symposium/Talk/Workshop
Event Discipline: Others

Peer Community In (PCI; https://peercommunityin.org/) is a disruptive revolution in science that is changing the publication landscape and shifting power from publishers to authors. PCI is a viable alternative to the current costly, non-transparent, and non-reproducible publication systems. PCI is a scholar-led non-profit association that creates communities of researchers who conduct peer-reviews on and recommend preprints in their scientific fields. Once preprints are endorsed by the community, authors can choose to publish with any of the affiliated journals with no additional peer review (https://peercommunityin.org/pci-and-journals/), with one possibility being the associated diamond (no fee) open-access Peer Community Journal (https://peercommunityin.org/pc-journal/).

PCI is free of charge to authors and readers. Community endorsements are citable and published together with all editorial correspondence (reviews, recommender decisions, author responses). There are now over 15 thematic PCIs across the sciences, such as for Neuro, Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, Animal Science, Health, Archaeology, and others. PCI is supported by over 100 public research institutions and libraries from around the world with a sustainable long-term budget.

‎"Peer Community in Registered Report"‎ (PCI-RR; https://rr.peercommunityin.org/) is one of the themed PCIs launched in 2021, which is focused on Registered Reports. Registered Reports (http://cos.io/rr) are a publication process in which Stage 1 journal/community peer review occurs on a pre-registration plan prior to any data collection. Once the pre­registration passes peer review and is approved, the journal/community grants authors an in-principle acceptance guaranteeing the publication of the article provided that data collection and analysis follows and intended plan. This emphasizes design, methods, and rigor, addressing issues of reviewers' and publication bias with publication of findings regardless of data collection outcomes, with the Stage 2 peer review focused solely on ensuring adherence to the Stage 1 plan (or documenting deviations). This publication process helps meets the highest standards of open-science, overcoming biases such as publication bias, confirmation bias, outcome bias, and hindsight bias.

In the last two years Dr. Feldman's CORE team based at HKU (https://mgto.org/core-team/) has submitted over 25 PCIRR manuscripts, with some already published, and most already granted Stage 1 in-principle acceptance. All of those led and coauthored by early career researchers and HKU UG/MSc students. As an example, two of their PCIRR endorsed manuscripts have been published with Collabra:Psychology, an open-access journal, after the editor reaching out to the team to submit after seeing the community endorsement of Stage 1, and with APC fees waived. Overall, it has been a very positive and rewarding experience.

Dr. Gilad Feldman will discuss the growing challenges with the current science publication system, briefly introduce Peer Community In, Peer Community Journal, and Peer Community in Registered Reports and the hope that they represent, and share his HKU CORE team experience with PCIRR, with concrete examples showing how this new model is beneficial to both authors, universities, the academic community, and the general public.


Biosketch:
Dr. Gilad Feldman is an assistant professor with the psychology department at the University of Hong Kong. His work is in the areas of social psychology and judgment and decision-making. In recent years, following signs regarding the need for a science reform and a credibility revolution, Gilad has taken a special interest in the movement for improvement of psychological science to implement and promote open-science, meta-research, large team science, diamond (no fee) open access, and community indicatives. More details on Gilad can be found at https://giladfeldman.org/resume-cv/ .

Date/Time 26/10/2023 16:00-17:00 Venue Multi-purpose Zone, Level 3, Main Library Language English

Registration is open from 04/10/2023 09:00(HKT) to 25/10/2023 17:00(HKT) on a first-come-first-served basis. The registration quota for this event is 100. Registrants will be placed on a waiting list if the registration quota is reached.