ASAPbio and EMBO Press just launched Review Commons, a platform for high-quality, journal-independent peer review of manuscripts in the life sciences before they are submitted to a journal.

PLOS is part of a group of affiliate journals that have agreed to consider submissions with transferred reviews from Review Commons without restarting the review process. All of our journals within scope — PLOS Biology, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, PLOS ONE and PLOS Pathogens — now welcome submissions reviewed at Review Commons.

Authors can submit preprints or unpublished manuscripts to Review Commons for expert peer review coordinated by professional editors at EMBO Press. Authors can then decide the best home for this Refereed Preprint which contains the manuscript, the reviewers’ reports plus any author responses.

By engaging with preprints and related initiatives like Review Commons, PLOS empowers authors to share more of their work, earlier, so that they can start receiving feedback, credit and citations sooner, in addition to making the scholarly communication process run more efficiently. Researchers in the life sciences are clearly engaged with preprints, and we believe engaging with initiatives like Review Commons puts researchers first, and helps make research more fair, equitable, and accessible for more people. By submitting to Review Commons, authors will spend less time re-submitting their papers to multiple journals and can make informed decisions more quickly, without having to start the process from scratch.

We also support the notion that with Review Commons, reviewers can focus on reviewing for science and not on specific journal “fit” — we talk more about this idea in our post from November, Why Engage With Preprints?.

(We first announced our forthcoming involvement with Review Commons in September.)

Please see the ASAPBio & EMBO press release here.