In response to the current pandemic and in order to increase the efficiency of peer review and the publication process of crucial COVID-19 research, we joined together with the Royal Society, PLOS and PeerJ to create a reviewer pool and implement portable review.
This collaboration quickly evolved into the C19 Rapid Review Initiative – a large-scale collaboration among publishers and organizations across the scholarly publishing industry. The initiative calls for volunteer reviewers to commit to rapid reviewing times and to pre-agree that their reviews and identity can be shared among publishers and journals, if submissions get rerouted to different publication venues. For more information please read our formal Letter of Intent.
The initiative has received a positive response with almost 2,000 researchers signing up as rapid reviewers, from more than 80 countries. In addition, the C19 Rapid Review Initiative is now endorsed by SSRN and AfricArxiv, and the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) will be driving forward the initiative’s reporting and analytics working group – using the C19 Rapid Review group as a case study for their wider research on research projects.
Recently, UCL Press, Springer Nature, MIT Press, and Cambridge University Press joined the collaboration with a number of their titles, increasing the original group of nine publishers and organizations to 20.
We are amazed by the commitment to the group and welcome all our new members and endorsers. What started as a discussion among colleagues about how to deal with a challenging situation has evolved into one of the largest ever cross-publisher collaborations in the scholarly publishing industry, demonstrating in a profound way the power of community.
We hope that this collaboration will become the norm post-pandemic, providing us with the opportunity to focus on other areas of research that also deserve our collective attention. We also welcome more publishers and potential endorsers, particularly those in the social sciences space, to get in touch if they are interested in joining.
We will be announcing more from our reporting, preprint and data sharing working groups in the coming weeks, as we enter the next phase of the initiative.
Read the official press release here.