JMIRx Journals Join the PRC Alliance as a Founding Member
Marking a major step in open scholarship, JMIRx journals have joined the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) Alliance as a founding member to help advance more open, transparent, and flexible approaches to scholarly publishing.
Joining the PRC Alliance as a founding member reflects the longstanding commitment of JMIRx journals to the PRC approach. JMIRx has operated as an overlay journal series since 2019, building a publishing workflow around preprints, peer review, and the curation and publication of peer-reviewed versions of research.
As a founding member, JMIRx will contribute its experience and expertise to a growing community of PRC implementers, including journals, publishers, preprint servers, repositories, and peer-review services. The Alliance provides an opportunity to collaborate on shared challenges, develop common approaches, and help shape the infrastructure and practices needed for a more interoperable scholarly communication ecosystem. The Alliance is guided by principles including openness, equity, interoperability, and stakeholder governance.
How can this benefit researchers?
For researchers, the continued development and adoption of PRC approaches can offer several important benefits:
- Earlier access to research: Research outputs can be made publicly available before formal journal publication, allowing researchers and the wider community to access and engage with findings sooner.
- Greater transparency: Peer-review reports and other review and curation outputs can be made openly available, providing additional context about how research has been evaluated.
- Recognition for peer review: Openly published review reports can make reviewers’ scholarly contributions more visible. JMIRx publishes peer-review reports and author responses alongside articles.
- More flexible publishing workflows: Because publishing, reviewing, and curating can occur as distinct stages, researchers can engage with different services and platforms without having to rely exclusively on a traditional linear publication process.
- Improved interoperability: The PRC Alliance is working toward greater interoperability among the services involved in publishing, reviewing, and curating research, which can make it easier for research outputs and their associated reviews to move between systems.
- A more open scholarly record: By treating articles, reviews, responses, and other research outputs as connected parts of the scholarly record, PRC can provide researchers and readers with a richer view of how research develops and is evaluated.
JMIRx’s founding membership in the PRC Alliance represents the next step in our commitment to experimenting with and advancing innovative models of scholarly communication. We look forward to working alongside other members of the Alliance to help build a publishing ecosystem that is more open, transparent, interoperable, and responsive to the needs of researchers.
Ludo Waltman, Scientific Director, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University; President of ASAPbio; and one of the driving forces behind this new alliance, said “For scholarly publishing to remain relevant, we must adopt a more transparent and efficient publishing system; one that ensures rapid access to new research outcomes and that provides open and transparent mechanisms for quality assurance. PRC is such a system.”
“Since 2019, JMIRx has seen firsthand how pairing preprints and PRC approaches can benefit authors, reviewers, and readers,” said Tiffany I Leung, MD, MPH, FAMIA, Scientific Editorial Director at JMIR Publications. “Working together with the PRC Alliance, we’ll share experience and learn from fellow members to continue achieving our shared goals of open science through innovative publishing models.”
The PRC Alliance is a joint initiative of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and ASAPbio. In the first year of its operation, the PRC Alliance will be hosted by COAR as part of the COAR Notify Project.