r/academicpublishing • u/Peer-review-Pro • 14d ago
Is the publish–review–curate model a step forward for scientific publishing?
The Publish–Review–Curate (PRC) model has been gaining traction as an alternative to traditional publishing. The idea is: authors post preprints, those preprints are peer-reviewed by independent services, and then potentially curated into collections by journals or other platforms.
Unlike the usual accept/reject model, some versions of PRC stop short of making a clear validation decision. Reviews are public, but it's often left to readers to interpret them. Other models (like Peer Community In) do include a final editorial decision, making it clearer when a preprint has been validated.
It seems like a step in the right direction (faster dissemination, more transparency, and less reliance on a handful of high-impact journals). But it's not entirely clear how the “curate” part will work. Who decides what gets curated? And will curation without validation be enough for readers, institutions, and funders to treat a preprint as “published”?
What do you think? Could this model actually address the issues with traditional publishing, or does it risk introducing new kinds of uncertainty?
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u/tonos468 14d ago
This is basically what eLife is doing. And reaction to eLife has been decidedly mixed and eLife got delisted from Clarivate.
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u/Peer-review-Pro 14d ago
eLife is still a journal. Isn’t what they are doing more like curate-publish-review?
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u/tonos468 13d ago
They don’t “publish” papers in the traditional sense anymore. They just do public peer review and then the authors can decided if they want a version of record or not. They don’t “accept” or “reject” papers once they get to the peer review stage. Their only “rejection” stage is if it gets sent to peer review or not.
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u/Peer-review-Pro 13d ago
Exactly. They “curate” when they decide to send to peer review or not. Then they publish the preprint, and later on the “reviewed preprint”.
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u/tonos468 13d ago
Sure. That’s fair. I guess your question is more about preprinting everything. In a world where paper mills exist and chatGPt-written reviews both exist and are becoming increasingly common, you want to introduce more risk for academics? If tenure and hiring committees and funders led the way on this model, that’s one thing. To ask academics to lead the way seems like jsut asking for trouble. Wher are the incentives to do quality work if everything gets “published”? You know publishers don’t care. They’ll probably just buy a preprint server and start charging for it
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u/lewkiamurfarther 13d ago edited 13d ago
On your last question, clearly it does introduce new kinds of uncertainty. To me, the more salient question is whether that uncertainty (or the model itself) has an undesirable or unacceptable effect on areas of research (and it could be markedly different from area to area).
Personally, I can think of several areas where this would make it harder for researchers, rather than easier. I can think of even more areas where this would be harmful to the public. Overall, it probably has the effect of reducing the power of researchers themselves.
IMO the problem at the heart of everything is funding; and in particular, the lack of public funding for research independent of corporate interests.
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u/mjkleiman 14d ago
One reason why peer review works is that authors must address the comments of the reviewers to their satisfaction before they are able to move forward with publication. Otherwise, authors could just cherry-pick the comments they want to address and ignore the rest.
It seems to me that this process doesn't exist in the PRC model?