The open-science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), published by the open-access scholarly publisher and technology innovator Pensoft Publishers, became one the founding members of the new Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) Alliance, a coalition of more than 40 funders, universities, publishers, platforms and infrastructure providers aiming to promote innovation around scholarly publishing workflows.
RIO has been operating a very similar model and will have transitioned to a full PRC model by mid-2027. Additional journals from Pensoft’s portfolio are expected to follow suit shortly thereafter.
About the PRC Alliance
The PRC Alliance promotes a researcher-centred model for scholarly publishing in which research outputs are first published and then subjected to open peer review and editorial curation. This decoupled approach makes findings available more quickly, while giving readers greater insight into the comprehensiveness of the work.
The Alliance is a joint initiative of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and ASAPbio, and it will be hosted by COAR as part of the COAR Notify Project in its first year of operation. The list of founding members includes high-profile organisations and Open Science innovators, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Europe PMC, Peer Community In (PCI) and Review Commons.
Why RIO?
Since its launch in 2015, RIO has been catalysing culture change in research communication by publishing early, intermediate and final scientific outputs from across the entire research cycle. With RIO, the entire research process, including work that would normally be lost, receives efficient and timely visibility, discoverability and recognition, as well as permanent availability, accessibility and citability.
Amongst the journal’s publication types are Research Ideas, Grant Proposals, Data/Software Management Plans, Workshop/Project Reports and many others. Aiming to bring together the whole research cycle, the journal also welcomes outputs from later stages, such as Research Articles, Review Articles, Software Descriptions and Policy Briefs.
Of these, some publication types are exempt from mandatory review evaluation and proceed to publication straight away following an in-house integrity check. In all cases, RIO publications are open to post-publication review, where all evaluations would be made public, signed, and provided with DOIs.
Since its inception, RIO has been continuously implementing various open-science innovations and workflows to enhance transparency and FAIRness in scholarly communication. These include SDG mapping for each publication; permanently linked updated versions of previously published content; open-science project-branded collections designed to bring together all outputs coming from a specific scientific project regardless of their publication source; and a user-friendly nanopublication workflow meant to further improve the reusability and granularity of published outputs in a machine-comprehensible manner for our AI-powered age.
Furthermore, as part of Pensoft’s academic portfolio, RIO runs on a technologically advanced platform optimised for accessibility, discoverability, machine-readability and reusability. In its latest installment, Pensoft’s publishing environment features a wide array of functionalities and workflows designed to ensure available research outputs are AI-FAIR, matching the needs and expectations in an AI-driven world.
The RIO journal has long stood out as a pioneer in expanding the concepts of scholarly publication, peer review and scientific literature curation so that the community benefits from more timely and efficient access, use and recognition of research effort. As such, it makes perfect sense for RIO to move to a full PRC model and join the PRC Alliance in this new effort to improve openness of research.
Pensoft’s vision
Through its participation in the Alliance, Pensoft hopes that the PRC model can support and encourage research shared at a more granular level, while also providing greater visibility and recognition for valuable scientific work that would not typically see the light of day. This could include documents for individual steps of the research cycle, as well as nanopublication-style atomic units of knowledge. Pensoft also looks forward to working with fellow members to coordinate efforts and to support innovative PRC initiatives.
“As a collaborative and formal community of experts in the field, the Alliance provides an unprecedented opportunity to fuel wider and responsible adoption of the PRC model, which has become a necessity in academia due to current challenges in scholarly communication. This is why it’s an honour to be amongst the founding members of this fantastic community.”
- – Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev
“RIO is about publishing the research process in a granular fashion, about inviting criticism and collaboration throughout, and about communicating the process and its outcomes efficiently and sustainably to researchers, the wider public and to machines. With the PRC Alliance, we have found partners whose approach to gardening the research landscape is similar, and we’re looking forward to fruitful exchanges with them and their respective communities.”
- – Daniel Mietchen, Editor-in-Chief of Research Ideas and Outcomes
About Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO)
Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) is an open science journal that publishes outputs from any stages of the research cycle on a single collaborative platform, with an open and public peer-review process. It is part of the academic portfolio of Pensoft Publishers.
About Pensoft Publishers
Pensoft is an independent, open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider, best known for its 30+ biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, One Ecosystem, and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics. Ever since becoming the first to introduce semantic enrichments and hyperlinks within a scientific article in the field of biodiversity in 2010, Pensoft has been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.
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For more information on the Publish, Review, Curate Alliance and its full list of founding members, visit https://publish-review-curate.org.
