Sciety Product News 19/11/2024

New preprint evaluation groups ahoy!

11 days ago   •   2 min read

By Mark Williams

The latest platform news from sciety.org, the home of community preprint evaluation.

🚀 What's new?

We are please to share that Access Microbiology, the innovative open research platform offered by the Microbiology Society is now live on Sciety. Access Microbiology offers a way for members of the Society’s community to share their work rapidly, transparently and rigorously which is very much aligned to Sciety's mission to foster trust and transparency in the preprint landscape.

Look out for our full press release following shortly.

🔭 What's next?

MetaROR

This month will see the launch of MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) – who are embracing the Publish-Review-Curate model

MetaROR are making the most of the innovative, open PRC infrastructure; including use of Kotahi so there is a swift route to aggregating and showcasing the reviews on Sciety!

Here's a sneak preview of their page on our staging site where the reviews will appear as they go live in the next few days.

Join MetaROR for their official launch on November 21 or an online seminar on November 26

https://researchonresearch.org/metaror-launch/

DocMaps

We will make improvements to the DocMaps to surface more of the metadata associated with community peer evaluation. Sciety DocMaps create a machine-readable history of peer evaluations and updates for preprints. This history can be used to discover work and help in formalising and recognising the scholarly contributions of community preprint peer evaluation initiatives.

OpenAlex Categorisation

We're working with OpenAlex to improve the categorisation of research articles on Sciety. Currently we are using the categorisation offered by BioRxiv/MedRxiv, but we are exploring ways in which we might meaningfully help people navigate the increase in representation of preprint review that sits outside of life sciences.

UX Improvements to evaluation signals

As the PRC (Publish, Review, Curate) model of publication gains traction, we’re adapting Sciety’s user experience to better facilitate the outputs of the communities involved. We're placing greater emphasis on making reader-focused signals—such as curated recommendations—more prominent. These signals help readers quickly identify valuable preprints, guiding them to trusted and well-reviewed content. Here is a design direction that we are exploring:

A screen grab of a potential design direction for highlighting PRC activity
A potential design direction for highlighting PRC activity

💬 Your voice matters

We want to make community preprint evaluation a go to signal for knowing which papers to read and we can't do this without your input. We're especially interested in what you think about our design direction for PRC, so Book a 1:1 call to learn more about our latest changes and help us plan the future of equitable, open research outputs.

🔗 Stay connected

We’ll be back shortly with everything that's happening on Sciety.

Until then, you can find us on Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.

Spread the word

Keep reading