The FORCE11 PREreview Club is keeping the community momentum going after a great session by the PREreview team at this summer’s Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI)! We recently published our first open review. Over the course of two 90-minute online discussions and about a week of asynchronous collaboration, we got to know each other and discussed reforms in academic publishing over the past quarter-century. Participants came from time zones ranging from PST to IST, and from fields including publishing, librarianship, social sciences, life sciences, and research ethics.

Xiuqi “Jade” Li, who led the selection of our first preprint and served as Notetaker for our first review call, shares some thoughts on the experience:

Participating in the FORCE11 PREreview Club felt like joining a journal club with a tangible outcome. Like the journal clubs I’ve been part of before, I found a real sense of community—a friendly space to discuss and dissect a paper (in this case, a preprint). But this time, it extended far beyond my local circle. Discussing a preprint with colleagues with diverse interests and backgrounds brought in perspectives that really enriched my own understanding of the work; others noticed nuances I might have missed during my own reading.

What made this experience stand out was that our discussion didn’t end with the Zoom conversation. Together, we wrote a constructive review that was shared openly online. There’s something uniquely rewarding about seeing that collective effort become part of the broader scholarly dialogue. I hope our review proves useful to the authors and contributes to the scholarly conversation around academic publishing, the topic of the preprint we reviewed. I look forward to continuing with the Club, engaging in thoughtful exchanges, and helping to make peer review a bit more open and collaborative.

Güleda Doğan, a FORCE11 Board Member who joined the first review call and led the asynchronous portion of the review, reflects on the experience here:

Our first FORCE11 PREreview created a real sense of shared learning and community. It brought together people who care about openness, collaboration, and thoughtful dialogue, values that are also central to FORCE11. The mix of live and asynchronous discussions worked particularly well. It allowed participants to think, return, and respond at their own pace, which made the review process feel more inclusive and less hierarchical.

What I appreciated most was how naturally a constructive tone emerged. Reviewers approached the preprint not simply to evaluate it, but to understand and improve it together. The process reminded me that open peer review is not only a method but a mindset. It combines rigor with empathy and turns reviewing into a space for collective reflection. In this sense, the PREreview felt very much aligned with FORCE11’s ongoing effort to reimagine scholarly communication as an open, participatory practice.

The Club is fortunate to have Rosario Rogel-Salazar, a PREreview Champion, as one of our founding members:

Joining the FORCE11 PREreview Club has been a wonderful opportunity for me. This year, I’ve had the honor of being part of the 2025 PREreview Champions cohort, and supporting the launch of this Club felt like a natural extension of that role. I’ve been involved with the FORCE11 community before—attending workshops and even facilitating one—and as soon as I heard this Club was forming, I reached out to ask how I could contribute. As a scholar deeply committed to open science, I’ve seen how open peer review still has limited visibility in Latin America, where I’m based. Being part of a Club that reaches beyond my region reminded me that we all—even those of us still learning to express ourselves in English—have something valuable to offer. I’m especially grateful for how warmly my suggestions have been received, and for the openness of this community to listen to voices from different parts of the world.

The FORCE11 PREreview Club is part of FORCE11’s Community Engagement Committee. In line with FORCE11’s mission, we review preprints about topics in metascience and scholarly communication. We’re about to publish another review in November! If you’re interested in the FORCE11 PREreview Club, please complete this form.

Güleda Doğan, Xiuqi “Jade” Li, Jennifer Miller, and Rosario Rogel-Salazar contributed to this blog post.