Shining a spotlight: How preLights and Sciety elevate preprints for a wider audience

A conversation between preLights and Sciety.org

Sciety is a free to use platform that aims to improve research communication by facilitating the discovery and organisation of the preprint literature. Through Sciety, scholars can connect with peers, receive feedback on their work, and contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their respective fields. Here we talk to Sciety’s Product Manager, Mark Williams, and eLife’s Community Manager – Outreach, Shane Alsop, to discuss the past, present, and future of Sciety – and how it can help our preLighters.

How did the idea for Sciety come about?

The surge in preprints during the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for immediate access to research findings – especially within the fields of health and medicine. This led to a need for more evaluation and organisation of the literature and, while lots of groups started working on this, it was done in disparate locations with whatever tooling they could find. We therefore launched Sciety in late 2020 with the aim of decentralising peer review and enhancing the quality and accessibility of published research. Created by a small but dedicated team within eLife, Sciety offers a single platform that aggregates (preprint) peer review outputs, allowing researchers to easily access, curate and organise the literature and associated reviews into dedicated lists, all in one place. Ultimately, Sciety aims to help researchers navigate the preprint literature, saving them time by facilitating easier and quicker access to valuable materials.

How has Sciety evolved since its inception? 

The growing popularity of preprints is reshaping publishing, offering fresh opportunities and challenges. Sciety has evolved alongside the needs of the broader research community, particularly focusing on the value of multiple reviews for a single preprint. This was achieved early on through projects like the Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium (NCRC) and the use of automated screening tools. Alongside traditional forms of article peer review, Sciety is able to highlight reader centric statements that provide an assessment or endorsement of a particular preprint, a commenting feature that lets users add insights on why research merits further reading or scrutiny, and a signal of which expert evaluating groups have added a particular preprint to their own reading lists. We consider these trust indicators to allow readers to make informed decisions about the potential importance/relevance of research. preLights is a great example of this for preprint highlighting. Milestones such as the integration of evaluation metadata into publications and the implementation of AI recommendation tools showcase Sciety’s ongoing development.

Could you describe the current user base of Sciety? How widespread and diverse is it?

Sciety serves two main audiences: those seeking preprints and associated review objects, such as formal reviews, curation statements or comments providing context, and curators who organise literature for various purposes, including personal reference or for initiatives like journal clubs.

Collaborations with multilingual partners, including SciELO, demonstrate Sciety’s commitment to inclusivity, and we aim to further broaden its user base by fostering more collaborations and partnerships worldwide, welcoming diverse groups and individuals. Additionally, we are exploring ways to represent PREreview Clubs’ evaluations on Sciety, further diversifying content by language, demographics, and subject areas. By expanding Sciety’s support for preprint servers beyond the life sciences and medical fields, such as OSF preprints, we seek to provide a broader range of valuable research resources to its users.

How do you incorporate user feedback into improving the platform?

Feedback plays a pivotal role in Sciety’s development, which we use to evolve the platform by understanding and addressing the needs and preferences of our audience. Various feedback channels, including user interviews, focus groups, and single question surveys facilitate ongoing engagement and input from users, and we try to work on solving the problems that are felt most widely and deeply. 

For example, we heard that Sciety’s “Saved articles” list function didn’t allow people to express their reason for curating the list – for reading or highlighting preprints to an audience – so we made it possible to create multiple lists and edit the title and description to give valuable context as to a list’s purpose. We’re currently enhancing that feature for group representatives to enable them to add imagery to their lists, which should help people more easily identify them. We would encourage preLighters to get in touch to try this out.

We often hear that people are struggling to keep up with the growing number of publications, and we hope to make it easier for them to do that in the preprint space. We believe that if we listen to feedback, and in turn implement changes to help overcome the difficulties we hear about, we can feed into a collaborative feedback and development loop that benefits Sciety and the research community as a whole.

How do you think preLighters can benefit from using Sciety?

The feedback we’ve received so far has emphasised that researchers using Sciety mostly value its human-led curation aspect, and find it compelling to access preprints deemed important or interesting by various groups, whether familiar or unfamiliar to them.

preLighters joining Sciety will be able to directly contribute to the platform’s network of curated literature, thereby facilitating knowledge exchange and saving time for other researchers in their field. Additionally, Sciety presents an opportunity for researchers to participate in a global network of peers and engage with diverse perspectives. Furthermore, encouraging and promoting initiatives like preLists through Sciety can foster collaboration and knowledge sharing, allowing users to follow each other’s activities and build reading lists.

We also aim to explore different media formats with Sciety, such as podcasts or video sessions, to cater to varied preferences in consuming research material, thereby enriching the user experience and expanding accessibility.

Looking ahead, what are Sciety’s plans for future development and growth?

We envision broader engagement from society publishers in utilising Sciety for article curation and review, ultimately leading to improved outcomes for all stakeholders. Societies are uniquely placed to re-imagine what peer review looks like and have the expertise to do so. Sciety offers a way to elevate the profile of their work alongside other forward-thinking organisations.

Sciety’s development roadmap includes enhancing the feed functionality to surface diverse content beyond preprints, such as review activity and user engagement, with the overarching goal of facilitating rapid access to research. By staying agile and responsive to technological advancements, Sciety will help capture discussions happening across various other platforms like Slack and Twitter in a meaningful way that builds trust in research. 

We recognise the diverse nature of preprint evaluation groups, and plan for Sciety to adapt alongside them while prioritising user experience, ensuring that researchers can discover and engage with relevant research without feeling overwhelmed. Peer reviews, assessments and endorsement, organised together with the literature, provide trust indicators that assist readers in making informed decisions about the significance and reliability of research findings. By surfacing and applying all the ways in which technology facilitates a conversation about research, we hope that we can help people find the relevant research and make more informed decisions in a shorter amount of time. Eventually, our goal is to create a network bringing together and highlighting the benefits of open publishing models and initiatives that are transforming scientific publishing for the better.

We would love to hear from preLighters about their work and how Sciety can help to amplify it further. Sign up to Sciety’s bi-monthly Community Newsletter and weekly Product News to learn about our latest developments, upcoming opportunities and events.

If you’d like to learn more about Sciety, email Shane (shane@sciety.org) or Mark (mark@sciety.org), and they’d love to catch up for a chat.