Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) Model

“Publish, Review, Curate” (PRC) is the term ASAPbio uses for a family of scholarly-publishing initiatives that invert the traditional journal sequence. Instead of peer review happening privately before anything is public, a research output is posted openly first, and structured review — followed by curation or endorsement — happens afterward, in public. It is not a single platform or product; it is an organizing framework ASAPbio and partner organizations use to describe and compare a growing set of preprint-review initiatives that share this same basic shape.

What “Publish, Review, Curate” Means

In conventional journal publishing, review is a gate: a manuscript is evaluated privately, and only work that passes review becomes publicly visible as a published article. PRC reorders those steps. A preprint or other research output is made public first; open, often named, peer review follows on that already-public version; and a curation layer — endorsement, structured summary, or aggregation — is applied on top of the reviewed output. ASAPbio, the scientist-driven organization focused on preprints and open communication in the life sciences, uses PRC as shorthand for describing this pattern across otherwise very different initiatives, rather than as the name of any one service.

ASAPbio President Ludo Waltman has described PRC initiatives as those that “build on the growing trend of preprint sharing,” where communities “peer review openly available preprints, providing an evaluation and/or endorsement” of the work. That framing is deliberately broad: PRC covers everything from journal-style overlay review to community-run preprint review projects, as long as the publish-then-review-then-curate sequence holds.

The Three Stages

Publish. A researcher makes a research output — an article manuscript, dataset, or study registration — public, typically by posting it to a preprint server or open-access repository, before any formal review has occurred.
Review. Reviewers evaluate the already-public output openly and transparently. Depending on the initiative, this can mean named reviewer reports published alongside the preprint, structured community evaluation, or a formal editorial review process layered onto the posted version.
Curate. Reviewed outputs are organized, highlighted, or summarized — through endorsements, curated collections, or aggregated review records — so that readers and evaluators can find and assess which preprints have been reviewed and how.

Origins: A Joint ASAPbio–COAR Initiative

PRC as a named framework has been developed jointly by ASAPbio and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), with funding from the Arcadia Fund, through a dedicated project and website (publish-review-curate.org) that describes PRC as “a scholarly publishing model in which research outputs are first published prior to any subsequent open review and/or curation.” COAR’s involvement connects PRC to repository infrastructure and to the COAR Notify protocol, a technical standard that lets repositories and review services exchange machine-readable notifications about review and curation activity on a given output — the connective tissue that lets a preprint server, a review initiative, and an aggregator like Sciety stay in sync about what has been reviewed and by whom.

Why ASAPbio Says PRC Is Gaining Momentum

ASAPbio has pointed to three drivers behind growing interest in PRC-style publishing:

Research integrity concerns. A high and rising volume of journal-article retractions (ASAPbio has cited over 10,000 retractions in 2023 alone, a figure reported elsewhere in the retraction-tracking literature) has increased interest in publishing models with more visible, traceable review.
Research assessment reform. As institutions and funders move away from journal-title and impact-factor proxies toward recognizing a wider range of research outputs — including peer review reports themselves as citable, creditable work — PRC’s emphasis on open, attributable review fits that shift.
Policy and funder support. ASAPbio points to backing from bodies such as cOAlition S and the European University Association as political tailwind for preprint-first, openly reviewed publishing.

Platforms and Initiatives Cited as PRC Examples

ASAPbio’s own materials name specific initiatives as working examples of the PRC model:

eLife. Since 2023, eLife publishes essentially all peer-reviewed submissions it evaluates as Reviewed Preprints — the preprint plus public reviews and an eLife assessment — without a traditional accept/reject decision gating publication. It is one of the most frequently cited large-scale examples of PRC in practice.
Peer Community In (PCI). A free, community-run network of discipline-specific committees that publicly peer-review and recommend preprints without a traditional journal sitting on top of the process.
Transformations: A DARIAH Journal. An overlay journal built directly on the PRC pattern within the digital-humanities DARIAH infrastructure.
MetaROR. A field-specific reviewing initiative ASAPbio cites alongside eLife and PCI as an operating PRC example.
Discrete Analysis and other overlay journals. Overlay journals review and curate preprints already posted to servers such as arXiv without republishing the text elsewhere, another structural variant of PRC.
Diamond open-access journals (ASAPbio cites the Cambridge Educational Research e-Journal as an example) that operate as low-cost, no-fee implementations of the same publish-first, review-and-curate-after sequence.

Alongside these, Sciety — while not itself a review service — describes itself as “a directory of organisations committed to public review and curation (the ‘R’ and ‘C’ of PRC), and a champion of their outputs.” It aggregates and indexes review activity from PRC-aligned initiatives (including ASAPbio’s own Crowd Review project) using COAR Notify, so that which preprints have been reviewed, and by whom, is discoverable in one place rather than scattered across individual platforms.

Other prominent preprint-review services often discussed in the same open-review ecosystem — such as Review Commons, which provides portable, publisher-independent review of preprints before journal submission — share PRC’s publish-first logic even where a given source does not label them with the PRC term specifically.

How PRC Differs from Traditional Peer Review

The structural difference is sequencing, not rigor. In traditional peer review, review is a precondition of publication: nothing becomes visible to readers until it passes. In PRC, publication (via preprint posting) and review are decoupled — the work is visible from the moment it is posted, and review is layered on afterward as an additional, usually public, signal about its quality. See CASRAI’s comparison of preprints and peer-reviewed articles for how that distinction plays out for readers and citing authors. This also changes what “publication” means: under PRC, a preprint that never attracts formal review is still a public, citable research output, whereas under the traditional model an unreviewed manuscript is simply unpublished.

PRC and the Broader Open-Science Movement

PRC did not emerge in isolation. It sits at the intersection of several open-science trends CASRAI covers elsewhere: the growth of preprint posting as a norm in more fields; publisher and funder policies that now explicitly accommodate or require prior preprint disclosure, including COPE’s guidance to editors on handling previously posted preprints; and research-assessment reform efforts that seek to credit review and curation work, not just the final version of record. PRC gives that broader movement a shared vocabulary — publish, review, curate — for describing initiatives that would otherwise look unrelated: a large established journal like eLife, a volunteer discipline-specific review community like PCI, and a lightweight overlay journal are all doing recognizably the same three-stage thing, just with different governance and scale.

For a research administrator or editorial-office professional, the practical takeaway is that “PRC” on a policy page, funder document, or publisher announcement is a signal that the initiative in question follows the publish-first, review-and-curate-after sequence — worth checking specifically what review and curation actually mean for that platform, since, as ASAPbio itself notes, PRC covers a wide range of different implementations rather than one fixed process.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who created the “Publish, Review, Curate” term?

PRC as a named framework has been developed and promoted jointly by ASAPbio and COAR (the Confederation of Open Access Repositories), including through a dedicated joint website, with funding support from the Arcadia Fund.

Is eLife a PRC platform?

Yes. ASAPbio cites eLife’s Reviewed Preprints model as one of its working examples of PRC — publication of the preprint plus public peer reviews and an editorial assessment, without a traditional accept/reject gate.

Is a PRC-published preprint peer reviewed?

It depends on the specific initiative and whether review has actually occurred on that item. PRC describes a possible sequence — publish, then review, then curate — not a guarantee that every posted output has completed all three stages. A preprint on a PRC-aligned platform may be published but not yet reviewed, or reviewed but not yet curated/endorsed.

How does PRC relate to preprints in general?

Every PRC initiative depends on preprint posting as its starting point, but not every preprint is part of a PRC initiative — most preprints are posted to general-purpose preprint servers without any structured, public review layered on afterward. PRC specifically refers to initiatives that add organized, open review and curation on top of that base preprint layer.

Publish, Review, Curate (PRC): ASAPbio’s Framework for Preprint-First Publishing