Category: Pensoft

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.

RIO Journal 5 years on: over 300 published outcomes from all around the research cycle

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.

RIO shifts gears to serve as a project-driven knowledge hub

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.

For millennia, people have gathered data and knowledge – about where to hunt, eat, trade, and live – and shared it through experiences, stories and songs. Today, we continue to do so by creating and sharing knowledge in order to “advance human understanding and the common good.”

This year’s International Open Access Week theme, “The Cost of Knowledge,” reminds us that sharing knowledge has a price: subscription fees and article processing charges, the time and expertise of authors, reviewers and editors, and the investment and know-how behind user-friendly digital infrastructures.

Open from the very beginning
A streamlined process
- The ARPHA suite
- ORPHO – the next-gen tool for scientific writing
Reclaiming knowledge as a common good

The themes echo the ones we looked at during Peer Review Week 2026, where we gave our Editors-in-Chief the chance to share the challenges they face in sustaining the peer review process, from the influx of papers and data to the shortage of researchers willing to review – you can read what they told us here: https://blog.pensoft.net/2026/09/11/peer-review-week-2026-building-capacity-for-the-long-run/

Open from the very beginning

At Pensoft, open access has never been an add-on. Founded in 1992 by scientists for scientists, we launched our first journal, ZooKeys, as fully open access in 2008, and it has been open from its very first issue. After all, it has always been our thinking that research can only serve the common good when everyone can read it, use it and build on it. This is why from the very start, we wanted ZooKeys to speed up research and free the exchange of information in taxonomy.

That principle has shaped every journal we have incepted since from PhytoKeys and MycoKeys to Biodiversity Data Journal to more recently launched Natural History Collections and Museomics and Individual-Based Ecology.

Research Ideas and Outcomes journal homepage — RIO journal homepage.

In 2025, together with long-term collaborators from the open-science community, we founded the quite revolutionary and unique journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) with the aim to catalyse the culture change in research communication by publishing ideas, project proposals, data/software management plans and various other outcomes that would typically be lost for the scientific community. The recognition for RIO’s approach to scholarly communication came only half a year later when SPARC went on to name an Open Science Innovator.

Throughout our existence as a publisher all of our journals have been 100% open access. Hosted on our own ARPHA Publishing Platform and operating under CC BY license, all scholarly titles in our portfolio make sure that every article can be read, shared and reused freely while authors retain the copyright to their work.

Yet, open should also mean fair. Our article processing charges are among the most competitive in the field, and we are transparent about what they cover: we were among the first publishers to share our pricing and services through Plan S’s Journal Comparison Service, and publicly provide our Open Access and APC Policies in full compliance with the Plan S requirements. We also work with international consortia to further reduce financial frictions and administrative burden for researchers and their institutions. As of this year, for instance, we’ve partnered up with Bibsam Consortium to advance open scholarly publishing across Sweden.

A streamlined process

ARPHA Publishing Platform services — ARPHA services

Our proprietary ARPHA Publishing Platform offers a full-featured, end-to-end open access publishing and hosting solution, with a suite of connected services built around it.

The ARPHA suite

Apart from about 100 open-access scholarly journals, ARPHA powers the ARPHA Preprints platform, which seamlessly integrates with journals to let authors make their manuscripts publicly available upon submission; the platform also provides high-quality and technologically advanced open-access publication for conference outputs through ARPHA Proceedings and ARPHA Conference Abstracts. Through Advanced Books, authors and researchers can bring whole open access books to readers in semantically enhanced HTML and PDF formats.

ORPHO – the next-gen tool for scientific writing

Most recently, we launched ORPHO, our next-generation collaborative workspace for scientific writing. Within ORPHO, researchers and authors can enrich their manuscripts semantically, so that their research, as well as underlying data remains FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and AI-ready.

Together, these tools streamline the publication of text and semantically rich data, making openness a natural part of the research workflow rather than an extra step.

Also, along with Plazi, we run the Biodiversity Literature Repository on Zenodo, which gives articles, figures and taxonomic treatments their own DOIs and releases them under CC0, so the data inside publications can be found, cited and reused by platforms such as GBIF.

This is what a publisher built by scientists can offer: a model that treats knowledge as something to be shared, prices that stay open and transparent, and infrastructure that makes research easier to find, reuse and trust.

Throughout our existence as a scholarly publisher and technology provider, Pensoft has always considered it our responsibility to ensure that valuable research outputs are shared efficiently with the world. This gives everyone, everywhere, the opportunity to make sense of and use this knowledge, while giving full credit to the scientists behind it. This is how, in our vision, scientific work and knowledge can achieve optimal impact on society and future research.
comments Iva Boyadzhieva, Head of Journal development and PR at Pensoft.

Reclaiming knowledge as a common good

As this year’s Open Access Week puts it:

“Momentum is growing for approaches to treat knowledge as a common good and not a commodity to be mined.” – Open Access Week 2026

We believe that momentum is real, and we have seen it grow ever since the first issue of ZooKeys. At Pensoft we are proud to say that we have championed open access in publishing, building the tools, workflows and partnerships that make it work in practice, and we will keep doing so alongside the institutions, funders, editors and researchers who share this commitment.

Explore our journals and services at pensoft.net