Community Peer Review Initiative in Psychological Science Has Launched

PCI Psychology, an emerging community within the broader Peer Community In (PCI) framework that aims to transform peer review in academic publishing, is open for submissions.  

PCI Psychology​ serves as a free preprint recommendation service that supports subsequent publication of manuscripts in academic journals, as well as other dissemination options. PCI Psychology reviews and recommends preprints related to psychological research and scholarship that have not been previously published in a peer-reviewed journal.  

Read companion piece: AMPPS Accepts First Manuscript From Innovative Peer Review System

The program allows scientific psychologists to bypass the repeated peer review processes that occur when they submit a paper to one journal after another until an editor accepts it, said behavioral scientist Julia Bottesini, who initiated PCI Psychology and serves on its managing board. 

“Journals do curation really well and still need that,” Bottesini said. “But there’s not really a good reason for peer review to happen each time you submit to a different journal.” 

PCI Psychology is not a journal but functions like one. Authors can submit preprint manuscripts to the platform. After initial screening, recommenders then ensure the paper is reviewed. They then issue a decision letter indicating that the preprint has been recommended, rejected, or sent back to the authors for revisions.  

Recommended papers will appear on the PCI Psychology website, but they can also be published in the diamond open access Peer Community Journal. (Diamond open access is a model that does not charge fees to authors or readers.) Authors also have the option of submitting their PCI papers to other scholarly publications. Journals can commit to accepting PCI-recommended articles without additional peer review, or they can commit to providing a fast response to authors.

At launch, 14 journals agreed to the fast response commitment, including APS’s Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science. Twenty scientists have signed on as recommenders. 

Journal editors who participate in the PCI system benefit by receiving submissions that already include peer reviews and an editorial assessment, eliminating the need to recruit reviewers while still retaining full control over acceptance, revisions, or further checks, Bottesini explained.  

PCI Psychology’s managing board, in addition to Bottesini, includes APS Fellow Jennifer Tackett (Northwestern University), Don Moore (University of California, Berkeley), Andrea Howard (Carleton University), and Moin Syed (University of Minnesota).

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