Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: a two-step diamond OA process giving research communities back control of publishing

Organization

PCI is a non‑profit, non‑commercial organization founded in late 2016 under French status. It comprises several thematic PCIs and the Peer Community Journal (PCJ). The organization is managed by and composed of researchers. Its members are the founders of PCI, its support officer and a representative for each thematic PCI. Each thematic PCI comprises recommenders who serve as associate editors and a managing board chosen from among the recommenders by a representative elected by the recommenders. The research domain covered by a thematic PCI can be a scientific discipline (e.g. PCI Ecology, PCI Microbiology) or an object‑oriented subject (e.g. PCI Forest & Wood Science, PCI Infections). The managing board of each PCI deals with scientific matters, is responsible for the editorial decisions and manages correspondence between authors, reviewers and recommenders. New recommenders are proposed by current recommenders and nominated by the managing board based on their scientific expertise.

Editorial workflow

The editorial workflow can be described in three main steps (Figure 1):

1. The authors deposit their preprint and accompanying material in open access repositories that provide permanent identifiers.

2. The authors submit their preprint (i.e. provide the link to it) to a thematic PCI via a submission platform and suggest potential recommenders and reviewers. The managing boards check the submission for appropriate scope, the absence of plagiarism and the absence of financial conflicts of interest. Suggested recommenders validated by the boards are then invited to handle the evaluation. A preprint not chosen by any recommender after 20 days can be desk rejected.

3. If a recommender decides to handle the evaluation, they invite reviewers to obtain at least two reviews. Like most peer‑reviewed journals, the preprint will undergo one or several rounds of submission‑review‑decision‑revision and will be accepted or rejected. In cases of acceptance, the recommender writes a recommendation text explaining the study’s merits. This text and all the evaluations and authors’ replies are then published on the thematic PCI website and receive DOIs.

Figure 1

One peculiarity of the PCI model lies in its flexibility at all stages of the process: i) recommenders choose whether to handle a preprint; ii) reviewers can opt to sign their reviews; iii) authors of a PCI‑recommended preprint can decide to submit it to any journal (PCJ, PCI‑friendly journals or other journals) later.

Relationships with journals

Alternatively, authors can choose to submit their PCI‑recommended preprints to other journals. To date, 31% (277) of all PCI‑recommended preprints have been published in journals other than PCJ.

Journals vary in how they consider the reviews and editorial decisions performed by the thematic PCIs. Some journals declare themselves as PCI‑friendly and opt between two categories of commitments:

• Category 1 (21 journals): Accept the submissions without further peer review, if in their scope.

• Category 2 (67 journals): Promptly inform (five days or a short agreed‑upon period no longer than ten days) authors whether their submission is accepted, rejected or will be sent for complementary peer review.

Other journals showed an interest in the PCI evaluation process but have not committed to providing authors with a fast response. These journals are listed as publishing venues likely to reduce the delay between the recommendation of their preprint and its publication.

Lastly, journals may be considered aversive or hostile towards PCI by not recognizing the editorial process undergone by PCI‑recommended submissions, or by systematically rejecting submissions that have been peer reviewed and recommended by PCI.

PCI Registered Reports

The reproducibility crisis occurring in many scientific fields (e.g. Haddaway & Verhoeven, 2015; Open Science Collaboration, 2015; Schloss, 2018) has driven the emergence of novel publication processes promoting more rigorous research planning and limiting many questionable research practices (e.g. setting hypotheses after the results are known (HARKing), p‑hacking, cherry‑picking).

Preregistration involves researchers submitting their research questions and planned analyses to an independent registry before collecting data or writing their manuscript. This allows a more transparent research process (e.g. distinguishing planned and ad hoc hypotheses) and incentivizes more rigorous practices.

To prevent publication bias and validate robust research plans, preregistrations can then be evaluated via registered reports (RRs). RRs consist of a two‑stage evaluation: before data are collected and after results are obtained. The first evaluation scrutinizes the context, hypotheses, research questions and methodology, and can lead to an in‑principle acceptance. The second evaluation checks for compliance with the proposed methods and evidence‑based conclusions (Chambers & Tzavella, 2022). Therefore, a rigorous study can be published regardless of its results, and RRs have successfully reduced positive results bias (Allen & Mehler, 2019; Lakens et al., 2024; Scheel et al., 2021).

PCI Registered Reports (PCI RR) was founded in 2021 by Chris Chambers, a central figure promoting RRs in journals (Chambers, 2013). PCI RR is customized for dealing with a two‑stage evaluation process (Zoccali & Mallamaci, 2023) and further addresses some of the current shortcomings of RRs (Chambers & Tzavella, 2022):

• PCI RR recommenders are trained and must pass an examination related to RR evaluation.

• Peer reviews of Stage 1 RRs can be scheduled in advance.

• One recommended Stage 1 RR allows the submission of several Stage 2 RRs.

• A taxonomy of levels of bias control is employed to assess the eligibility of Stage 1 RRs for submission and publication in PCI RR‑friendly journals.

Another particularity of PCI RR is its relationship with journals. PCI RR maintains its own list of PCI RR‑interested (8) and PCI RR‑friendly journals (37), primarily focusing on psychology and neuroscience, which are either notified of Stage 1 or Stage 2 recommendations or publish Stage 2‑recommended articles without further peer review. Furthermore, PCI RR is now the outsourced service for evaluating the RRs of journals (O’Grady, 2021) and is among the best‑rated services for RR evaluation (Meghreblian, 2025).

PCI’s history

PCI was founded in December 2016. The original idea – the public peer review and recommendation of preprints – came from a discussion on creating a publicly funded journal that would be more efficient and less costly than most journals. In 2017, the first thematic PCI was established in evolutionary biology, as this was the discipline in which Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud, the co‑founders of PCI, worked. Creating a new thematic PCI (PCI, 2025a) is a bottom‑up process. Researchers interested in founding a thematic PCI must submit a project to the PCI organization. The PCI members discuss and vote on whether to open the proposed thematic PCI. Other thematic PCIs have since been created and amount to 21 (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Before the launch of PCJ in November 2021, many authors who needed their PCI‑recommended article to have a VoR and to be indexed in major databases submitted their preprints to journals and were likely to experience long processing times if additional peer review were performed and/or pay high publication fees. PCJ was therefore created to meet the expectations of these authors. Note that publishing in a journal, even in PCJ, should be a temporary solution until recommended preprints are indexed and generally recognized as having the same value as an accepted article in a peer‑reviewed journal.

Finances

The complete description of PCI’s finance philosophy can be found on PCI’s website (PCI, 2024a). PCI’s financial resources come from in‑kind and monetary donations from public research organizations and universities, all publicly listed by TSOSI (Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure [TSOSI], 2026).

Funding relies on many small, recurrent contributions, with INRAE as the leading supporter (about 60% in‑kind) and CNRS, FNSO, COAR and INRAE providing half of the monetary donations. PCI minimizes expenses by optimizing resources, reducing costs and relying on volunteer researchers rather than outsourcing tasks. The web development of a custom‑built system adapted to PCI’s workflow constitutes the main expense. It allows an expanding portfolio of thematic PCIs more conveniently than non‑commercial (e.g. Open Journal Software) and is ultimately cheaper than commercial (e.g. Managing Editor) alternatives.

Given the uncertainty of open science funding in Europe, PCI has adopted a conservative strategy with financial reserves. Its model promotes efficiency and reduced costs in publishing, lowering article prices as submissions increase. Savings for institutions can then be reinvested in open science, supporting diamond open access publishing and expanding access to scientific knowledge while ensuring sustainability.

Development strategy of PCI and PCJ

The number of submissions across all thematic PCIs increased from 54 in 2017 to 504 in 2024. Similarly, the number of yearly recommendations reached 239 in 2024. These numbers vary between thematic PCIs, ranging (in 2024) from 7 to 159, with a mean of 30 (median = 14). The number of articles published in PCJ has also increased since its launch in 2021 and reached >100 articles per year since 2023 (Figure 3).

Figure 3

This positive trend could be explained by both intrinsic features of PCI and a strategy combining active communication and actions to remove barriers to submission:

• Unique positioning: PCI stands out among alternative publishing systems (e.g. diamond open access, preprint peer review) and has gained relative visibility despite a modest volume of submissions. As a result, it may attract authors actively seeking to engage in innovative and alternative publishing practices.

• Diamond open access model: Given that article processing charges can represent a barrier for some researchers (Shaw & Elger, 2018; UNESCO, 2021), the appeal of the diamond OA system might continue to grow. The increasing promotion and adoption of diamond open access in the academic community further enhances PCI’s relevance.

• PCI seeks institutional support (> 200 symbolic and financial supporters in 2025) and the recognition of PCI‑recommended preprints by doctoral schools and academic evaluation committees.

• The launch of PCJ and its indexing in major scholarly databases has enabled authors to benefit from a fast, free and well‑indexed publication pathway for their PCI‑recommended articles.

• Since March 2022, PCI has invited researchers to sign a manifesto (PCI, 2025c), committing to submit at least one article to PCI within the next 15 months and, if recommended, to publish it in PCJ. Within a year of its launch, the manifesto gathered over 1,000 signatures from 71 countries, likely contributing to a significant rise in submissions – especially between 2022 and 2023.

• The organization engages in active communication to promote awareness of the PCI model, including a strong presence on social media, virtual and in‑person presentations at research institutions and conferences and the organization of a quarterly PCI webinar series (PCI, 2025b).

• ‘There is enhanced interoperability between PCI, preprint servers and repositories. PCI recommendations are notified to preprint servers (e.g. bioRxiv, medRxiv, via hypothesis.io) and open archives (e.g. HAL, Digital.CSIC via COAR Notify), allowing them to automatically display a link to the preprint’s recommendation page. Furthermore, direct submissions can be made from bioRxiv (via B2J) to PCI Ecology and from HAL and Digital.CSIC (via COAR Notify) to all thematic PCIs.

• The PCI brand and organizational structure foster the creation of new thematic PCIs and support the development of corresponding sections in PCJ. This approach enhances disciplinary diversity and motivates researchers in currently uncovered areas to launch their own thematic PCIs.

• There are a large number of recommenders in thematic PCIs compared to the number of editors in traditional biology journals. As of 2024, all thematic PCIs combined have reached 2,473 recommenders. The recruitment of recommenders is conducted with attention to geographic, gender and career‑stage diversity to ensure broad community representation.

Comparison with other open science publishing initiatives

PCI evaluates preprints, publishes reviews and separates evaluation from publication within the diamond open access ecosystem. It hence resembles other open science publishing models (e.g. overlay journals, eLife, F1000, Review Commons, metaROR) that implement one or several of these features. However, unlike most preprint peer‑review services, PCI retains binary editorial decisions to clearly signal that a submission has been evaluated and validated by part of the scientific community (Bourguet & Guillemaud, 2024). We note, however, that all these initiatives rely on peer review, whose limitations are known (Aczel et al., 2025; Heesen & Bright, 2021; Sever, 2023). Ultimately, no single model fits all research communities when it comes to scholarly publishing, and we encourage authors to explore alternative systems that meet their own needs.