What happens to the scientific record when traditional journal publication is no longer a viable path to disseminate research?
Growing concerns about political interference over what is allowed to be published, funder limits on paying publication fees, and rapid reductions in organizations' staff have all recently strained traditional scholarly communication. Under these pressures, the ability of scientific findings to be seen, shared, and assessed by the broader community can wither. These challenges force a critical reassessment of how we ensure that scientific findings remain openly available as a public good and accessible for independent evaluation.
Scholarly communication benefits from multiple pathways for evaluating research rather than relying exclusively on traditional journal-organized peer review. Across the open science ecosystem, organizations are experimenting with ways to separate the functions of publishing, reviewing, and curating research, broadening participation while reducing dependence on any single institution or gatekeeper. This broader vision is reflected in the growing Publish–Review–Curate (PRC) movement.
PREreview is one example within this ecosystem. Our focus is on building open tools and cultivating communities that connect researchers seeking feedback with people willing to share their expertise. Other organizations are exploring complementary approaches. Review Commons coordinates expert peer review independently of journals before manuscript submission, allowing reviews to travel with the work across participating publishers. Peer Community In (PCI) organizes community-led peer review and recommendation of preprints through disciplinary communities. MetaROR is coalescing similar communities and infrastructure to support review and dissemination of metascience. Together, these efforts demonstrate that rigorous scientific evaluation can flourish through multiple, interconnected pathways, creating an ecosystem less vulnerable to disruption than one dependent on a single, centralized model.
PREreview does not offer peer review as a service in the traditional scholarly publication sense. We do not commission reviews, assign reviewers, or make editorial decisions. Instead, we provide free and open infrastructure that enables anyone with relevant expertise to review preprints and datasets when they choose, making the process and its outputs as transparent, accessible, and reusable as possible.
Live Reviews build on this model by adding one ingredient: facilitation. Rather than simply providing a place where independent reviews can be shared, Live Reviews bring people together to evaluate research collectively and publicly in an open forum. The goal is not merely to produce another review, but to cultivate communities capable of sustaining scientific evaluation beyond any single journal, institution, or decision-maker.
Live Reviews: Building a Different Culture of Peer Review
In 2018, PREreview hosted what would become our first Live Review.
The idea was simple: What if discussing a research manuscript did not require an invitation from a journal editor? What if researchers, students, clinicians, patients, and others with relevant expertise could gather online—regardless of where they lived or what institution they belonged to—to read a preprint together, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and collaboratively develop constructive feedback while there was still time for that feedback to meaningfully improve the work?
The only barrier to participation would be an internet connection. The only prerequisites would be curiosity, respect for others, and a willingness to be constructive.
Live Reviews are facilitated discussions of openly shared research outputs—typically preprints and, more recently, datasets—in which participants collectively examine the work, discuss its strengths and limitations, and develop constructive feedback that is openly shared and accessible to everyone.
But there is a prerequisite for all of this: the research itself must be open and available as a preprint.
Preprints allow authors to share their research before a publisher determines its fate. That simple shift places the initial decision to disseminate research in the hands of its authors and creates the conditions for community evaluation. Research can be read, questioned, and improved while it is still evolving, regardless of where it is ultimately published—or whether it is published by a journal at all.
This is an important source of resilience. Preprints distribute the ability to disseminate research beyond any single editorial pathway; open peer review similarly broadens the ability to evaluate it. Together, they make it harder for the decisions of any one institution to bring a scientific conversation to an end.
A recent Live Review made that principle unusually tangible during this moment of increased political pressure in the ecosystem.
A Live Review Case Study
Last June, PREreview hosted a Live Review of a medRxiv preprint written by scientists at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on COVID-19 vaccine safety. Journal publication of the manuscript had reportedly been withdrawn by political leadership at the FDA because its conclusion that "the FDA continues to believe that the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the risks" conflicted with the current administration's priorities.
The manuscript deserved rigorous peer review and broader scientific scrutiny. Were there systematic biases that should be identified and corrected? Did the methods and data support the authors' conclusions? Would the manuscript withstand scrutiny as written, or would it require substantial revision?
These are questions that deserve answers through scientific evaluation, not political preference.
Twenty-two people from academia, civil society, journalism, medicine, and scholarly publishing joined the Live Review. A subset of them participated as discussion reviewers by questioning the methods, considered the evidence, and collaboratively developed constructive feedback. The resulting review was shared openly with the authors and the broader community, creating a transparent record of the evaluation and its conclusions.
This case illustrates how preprints and open community review reinforce one another.
The manuscript had entered the public record through medRxiv on January 5, 2025, well before it could have appeared through a traditional journal publication process. When that publication pathway was reportedly halted, the research remained available for researchers, journalists, policymakers, and the public to read and scrutinize.
Open community review added a second layer: the evaluation could happen in public too. The preprint kept the research accessible. The Live Review kept its scientific evaluation moving forward.
Building Resilience Through Openness
The FDA preprint case illustrates one of the deeper promises of open science. Openness is not valuable only because more people can access research. Openness is also valuable because it can distribute the ability to share, question, and evaluate scientific claims across a much broader community in a transparent and equitable manner.
And distributing that ability creates resilience.
This is particularly important at a moment when the mechanisms governing scientific research in the United States are themselves changing—with threats to the scientific integrity afforded by peer review on the rise. The recent proposal to revise the White House Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Uniform Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance has led to an extraordinary level of public feedback with tens of thousands of public comments, including by our colleagues at ASAPbio and the Association of Research Libraries. Among the proposed changes are provisions that would expand the authority of political appointees over federal research funding decisions while reducing the role of independent subject-matter experts in evaluating scientific merit. A proposition handily rejected by the community.
The administration has already codified greater political oversight of federal science through the "Gold Standard Science" Executive Order. They've also silenced the Federal advisory committees that provide independent peer review over government research. The proposed OMB changes raise the prospect of extending greater political influence over the extramural research the federal government funds as well.
Regardless of one's political views, concentrating greater authority over scientific decision-making in any single office makes the research ecosystem more vulnerable to changing political priorities.
This is where bottom-up community and open infrastructure become essential.
No one system can guarantee that institutions, governments, publishers, or funders will always make decisions in the best interests of science or the public. But we can build a scholarly communication ecosystem in which the ability to share and evaluate research does not disappear when one of those institutions changes direction.
That is why the value of open community peer review goes beyond inclusion. It is also about distributing power.
Looking back, we no longer think the most important innovation was the Live Review format itself. It was creating spaces where people could practice evaluating research together—listening carefully, questioning openly, sharing expertise generously, and improving knowledge through dialogue without waiting for someone to tell them they could.
In the case of the FDA paper, those elements came together in a particularly consequential way. The research was already open. A community could gather around it. Its claims could be scrutinized publicly. And a decision made within one institution could not end the scientific conversation.
Political priorities will change. Publishing models will adapt. Technologies will continue to reshape how research is produced, reviewed, and shared. Resilience comes from ensuring that the ability to participate in science is not concentrated in any one of them.
Open infrastructure makes that possible. Communities make it meaningful. Together, they help build a scholarly communication ecosystem in which the responsibility for sharing, questioning, and evaluating scientific knowledge is held by many rather than a few—and in which science can remain a public good even when the institutions around it change.
Disclosures
DS: ChatGPT Plus was lightly used to edit some parts of this article to reduce repetition and improve flow.
Acknowledgements
We thank Alice Meadows for her thoughts on earlier versions of this article and Martin Fenner for editing the final draft.
References
- Morabia, A. (2025). AJPH and the Threat of Political Interference in Scientific Publishing. American Journal of Public Health, 115(5), 626–627. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2025.308100
- Corker, K. S., Waltman, L., & Coates, J. A. (2024). Understanding the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) Model of Scholarly Communication. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/h7swt
- Gruber, J. F., Ondari, M., Zelaya, C. E., Xia, C., Zhang, F., Hervol, J. R., Ye, J., Chen, M., Qin, Y., Hu, M., Chillarige, Y., Forshee, R. A., & Anderson, S. A. (2025). Safety Monitoring of Multiple Health Outcomes Following 2023–2024 COVID-19 Vaccination among Medicare Beneficiaries Aged 65 Years and Older in the United States. Public and Global Health. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.03.25319975
- Christopher Steven Marcum, Vasco Medeiros, Prasakthi Venkatesan, Myron Pulier, J Moonga, Toba Isaac Olatoye, Benjamin Senst, & Randa Salah Gomaa Mahmoud. (2026). PREreview of “Safety Monitoring of Multiple Health Outcomes Following 2023–2024 COVID-19 Vaccination among Medicare Beneficiaries Aged 65 Years and Older in the United States.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.21327744
Copyright © 2026 Christopher Steven Marcum, Daniela Saderi. Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
