Europe PMC is an open database containing life science journal articles and preprints. It offers access to over 43 million abstracts and over 9 million full text articles. As an avid preprint supporter, Europe PMC aims to improve their discovery and reuse. Preprints lack the traditional peer review process offered by journals thus the research community needs new ways to ensure their scientific quality.

Preprint review helps build trust in preprints. It offers many benefits to authors, readers, and reviewers. Preprint review enables rapid feedback from the community and expands the reviewer pool. Reviews are publicly available for anyone to read, improving review transparency. Access to preprint reviews allows readers, particularly non-experts, to contextualise new findings. 

Preprint review provides an exciting opportunity to experiment with new review models, such as the new eLife publication model. This has also led to the proliferation of communities that review, evaluate and comment on preprints. A recent publication found more than 20 different platforms dedicated to preprint review. As the number of review platforms grows, discovering preprint reviews becomes a challenge.

Discover preprint reviews in Europe PMC

To address the challenge of discovering reviews for preprints, Europe PMC has developed several features that surface available preprint reviews. On the preprint page, the review status is shown at the top in a banner, and for preprints with multiple versions review status also appears in the version history. The ‘Reviews & evaluations’ section on the preprint page gathers associated reviews in one place. The review timeline shows reviews in chronological order. To make the review process more transparent, the name and logo of the review group are shown for each review. Referee name(s) are included when available, to give credit to reviewers. Finally, readers can access links to the full preprint assessment. This helps make preprint reviews more discoverable and build trust in preprints.

Search for reviewed preprints in Europe PMC

To further support the discoverability of preprint reviews, Europe PMC now offers a way to find reviewed preprints using a dedicated search filter. This supplements the existing filter for preprints published in a journal. Nearly 9,500 preprints in Europe PMC have been evaluated by experts in the field. Currently, Europe PMC covers reviews from 20 communities and we hope to expand this in the future.

See the full update on the Europe PMC blog.

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