PCI RR

Use the Peer Community In Registered Reports (PCI RR) for publishing your work. An Alternative Publishing System.

Peer Community In Registered Reports (PCI RR) is a non-profit, non-commercial platform that publishes reviews of pre-prints. The reviews of the pre-prints are done by researchers of a community which corresponds with the respective research field of this pre-print, hence researchers that have expertise knowledge about the research topic. The reviewers do this for free.

To make use of this service, one first has to submit a Registered Report (RR) to PCI RR with their research questions, theory, and hypotheses (=stage 1). After this RR was reviewed, you’ll go on and conduct your study. After you uploaded your pre-print on a common pre-print server, you’ll submit it to PCI RR, too (=stage 2; note that one stage 1 submission can lead to multiple stage 2s). Then, researchers of your community review and edit your pre-print, just as it would be done when submitting a manuscript to a traditional journal. After you addressed the reviewer comments’, your pre-print gets recommended. If your pre-print gets recommended by the reviewer of your community, you then have the opportunity to submit your pre-print to a traditional journal (PCI RR-friendly journals; currently 29 journals). All this correspondence gets published too with your pre-print on the pre-print server.

And here comes the clue: The PCI RR-friendly journals have committed to accepting PCI RR recommendations without further peer review.

Why would you do this?

1) The reviews of PCI RRs take days rather than weeks due to a commitment system. 2) People who are doing the editing are mostly people working as editors for traditional journals, so the editing work isn’t any worse than from a traditional journal. 3) After recommendation, YOU get to choose the journal your study gets published in. 4) You don’t have to pay anything (this might not be the most important reason for you because German universities have agreements with some journals (e.g., DEAL) for Open Access publishing. However, in other countries this might not be given. So, by supporting PCI RR you can support researchers in these countries).