We're excited to share the transformative steps we've taken in furthering our mission to enable the discovery, evaluation and organisation of preprints.
2024 has been a year of significant expansion and innovation, with our team focusing on breaking down barriers to enable wider participation in open science, increasing accessibility, and creating more meaningful connections in the world of scientific research. Sciety continues to cement itself as scholarly infrastructure for preprint review and curation. It is now home to 36,000 evaluated preprints, with 76,000 evaluations from 27 community peer evaluation initiatives through 18 organisational partnerships. Notable new partners include the Microbiology Society and MetaROR.
🚀 Smashing it
This year Sciety exceeded funder goals by: increasing readership of preprints via the platform by 100%, increasing the use of curated lists as signals of trust in the research by 150%, and introducing a custom AI integration to recommend related preprints to readers.
↔️ Expanding our preprint ecosystem
One of our most exciting developments has been expanding the range of preprint servers we support. We've gone beyond our initial life sciences focus to include preprints from diverse fields across OSF preprint servers, including MetaArXiv, EarthArXiv, EcoEvoRxiv, engrXiv, SSRN, preprints[.]org and more. We’ve increased our number of indexed preprints from around 80,000 to over 150,000.
This expansion means researchers can now discover and evaluate preprints across a much broader spectrum of scientific disciplines.
👤 Enhancing user experience and accessibility
We've made significant improvements to make Sciety more user-friendly and accessible. To do this, we:
- Introduced user avatars for email signups, highlighting the human element of curation
- Developed a more intuitive homepage with browse-by-category functionality and more inclusive language
- Extended pagination across the application to improve loading speeds
- Added group management features allowing our communities to showcase their work more effectively
✨ Technological innovation
Through collaboration with our DataHub team at eLife, we’ve been able to improve how we surface preprints of interest. Key achievements include:
- Implementing a new Discovery API for recommended papers based on Semantic Scholar’s API
- Extending related articles functionality
- Article categorisation using bioRxiv and Open Alex classification
- Developing the COAR notify protocol to enhance communication between research platforms like Kotahi, Peer Community In and PREreview
- Including multimedia Cassyni Seminar Videos as part of an article feed
🎓 Scholarly infrastructure
As a preprint review aggregation platform, Sciety plays a crucial role in supporting the wider ecosystem. Sciety provides integrations for EuropePMC, bioRxiv and medRxiv so that they are able to filter and display preprints that have been community evaluated. This means that technologies for preprints and preprint review can be both decentralised and interoperable. We’re able to offer a central place to discover all preprint peer review by utilising DocMaps and COAR Notify protocols.
See our new entry in Infra Finder.
🤝 Community and partnership
Partnership is central to our work. This year we’ve seen an ecosystem growing around preprint peer evaluation, and as Sciety is an aggregator of peer reviews, we wanted to make sure we had a space for this ecosystem to congregate.
This year we:
- Launched our bi-monthly group networking calls to discuss critical issues in preprint evaluation with our evaluating communities. Participants from organisations like ASAPbio, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, eLife and PREreview have tackled hot topics such as the role of AI in peer review, how to get more early-career researchers involved in preprint reviews and more. These lively discussions are paving the way for exciting collaborations within the community
- Launched Community Member Spotlights, highlighting the great work that our partners are doing in preprint evaluation. Check out Reinier Prosée’s latest interview regarding preLights
- Added two more groups to Sciety. The Microbiology Society’s innovative journal Access Microbiology joins Sciety as well as meta research platform MetaROR, who are offering a full PRC model similar to eLife
- We are also sharing preprint review updates on Bluesky, where there has been a rapid adoption by the scientific community
⏩ Looking forward
As we move into the next phase of our journey, we remain committed to our core mission: creating a more transparent, accessible and collaborative research ecosystem. We're continuously working to reduce barriers to enable participation in open science, increase visibility and recognition of preprint evaluations, and provide researchers with powerful tools to discover and share cutting-edge research.
In 2025 we’re aiming to:
- Extend support to preprint servers with DataCite DOIs, such as arXiv, and other persistent identifiers for research objects
- Add more reviewed preprints from F1000 servers, ResearchHub and more groups as they emerge
- Remodel groups on Sciety to better highlight community-structured reviews, where peer review, crowd review, and individual commentary collectively contribute to the preprint discourse
- Extend COAR Notify support to communities that are utilising the PubPub platform, enabling them to be notified of, and notify Sciety of, preprint peer evaluations
- Develop curator profiles and social federation to enable open discourse (sharing/commentary) as people move fluidly between science communications spaces
We invite researchers, curators, and research groups to join us on the next stage of our mission. Whether you're looking to discover the latest preprints, evaluate research or showcase your group's work, Sciety is here to support you. Subscribe to updates via email or follow us on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
Warm wishes for 2025,
The Sciety Team
