Review Commons: How Portable, Publisher-Independent Peer Review Works

Review Commons is a journal-independent peer review platform for the life sciences, run jointly by EMBO (through EMBO Press) and ASAPbio. Authors submit a manuscript — typically already posted as a preprint — for a single round of professional peer review that happens before, and independently of, any specific journal. The resulting reviews then travel with the manuscript: authors can send the reviewed manuscript to any of the platform’s affiliate journals, which have committed to basing their editorial decision on those reports rather than commissioning a fresh round of review. Review Commons launched on December 9, 2019, as a joint EMBO–ASAPbio initiative. This guide explains how the model works, who is involved, and how it differs from the peer-review models CASRAI already covers.

What “portable, publisher-independent” peer review means

In conventional peer review, reviewers are recruited by a specific journal, evaluate the manuscript against that journal’s scope and standards, and report privately to that journal’s editor. If the paper is rejected, the author typically starts the whole process over at the next journal — new reviewers, a new round of review, often on largely the same manuscript.

Review Commons decouples the review from any single journal. A manuscript submitted to Review Commons is evaluated once, by reviewers assessing the science on its own merits rather than against one journal’s particular scope or house style. The output — the manuscript, the referee reports, and the authors’ response — is portable: the author decides which affiliate journal to send it to, and that journal has already agreed to treat the existing reports as the primary basis for its decision instead of restarting review.

Who runs Review Commons

Review Commons is a joint initiative of EMBO Press (the publishing arm of the European Molecular Biology Organization) and ASAPbio, the scientist-driven organization that promotes preprints and open, transparent communication of research. It operates with guidance from a Senior Advisory Board of practicing scientists. The platform was originally supported by a philanthropic grant during its first year of operation, and it has continued to operate without a submission fee to authors.

How the process works, step by step

1. Preprint first. Authors are encouraged to post their manuscript as a preprint on bioRxiv or medRxiv before or alongside submitting to Review Commons; direct submission is also possible.
2. Editorial assessment. A Review Commons managing editor checks that the manuscript meets the platform’s basic scope and quality bar before sending it out for review.
3. A single round of peer review. Independent referees evaluate the manuscript’s rigor and significance, with reviewer identities typically confidential unless a reviewer chooses to sign. Reviewers can see and comment on each other’s reports (cross-commenting) before reports go to the authors.
4. Author response. Authors receive the consolidated reports and write a response, which becomes part of the package.
5. Refereed Preprint. The manuscript, reviews, and author response together form what Review Commons calls a Refereed Preprint. This package is what travels onward — it is the deliverable of the whole process, not a byproduct of it.
6. Transfer to an affiliate journal. The author, not an editor, decides where to send the Refereed Preprint next. The transfer is initiated by the author from within the Review Commons editorial system and routed to whichever affiliate journal they choose.
7. Journal-level decision. The receiving journal’s own editors evaluate the existing reports and author response and, in most cases, request only minimal additional expert input rather than commissioning a full new review from scratch — though the final accept/reject decision, and any further revision requests, remain that journal’s own.

Which journals accept Review Commons reviews

Review Commons launched with 17 affiliate journals from six publishers — EMBO Press, eLife, PLOS, Rockefeller University Press, The Company of Biologists, and the American Society for Cell Biology — and the affiliate list has grown since. Journals that have participated include eLife, the EMBO Press titles (EMBO reports, The EMBO Journal, EMBO Molecular Medicine, Life Science Alliance), PLOS Biology, Journal of Cell Biology, Development, Journal of Cell Science, Biology Open, Disease Models & Mechanisms, Genetics, G3, and FEBS Open Bio. The current, authoritative list of affiliate journals is maintained on reviewcommons.org itself, since it changes as journals join; a research office advising an author should check the live list rather than a fixed one, including this one.

Sending a Refereed Preprint to an affiliate journal is not a guarantee of acceptance. The affiliate journal still makes its own editorial decision; what changes is that the journal has agreed, as a condition of affiliation, to use the existing reports as its starting point rather than sending the manuscript out for review again from zero.

How Review Commons differs from cascading peer review

CASRAI’s Cascading Peer Review entry covers a longer-standing, narrower pattern: a single publisher offering to pass a manuscript’s reviews from one of its own rejected-but-promising submissions down to another journal it also owns, so the author doesn’t start over within that publisher’s portfolio. Review Commons is a different shape of the same underlying idea, but with two structural differences that matter for how a research office should advise authors:

• It is cross-publisher, not within-publisher. Review Commons is not affiliated with any single publisher; its affiliate journals span at least six different publishing organizations. A manuscript reviewed once at Review Commons can, in principle, be directed to any of them.
• It is preprint-first and journal-independent by design. Traditional cascading peer review only exists because a manuscript was already submitted to a specific journal that then facilitated the handoff. Review Commons review happens before a journal is chosen at all — the author decides which journal to approach only after the review is complete, using the reviews themselves (and the reviewers’ assessment of significance and rigor) as part of that decision.

How Review Commons differs from eLife’s Reviewed Preprints

Review Commons and eLife’s Reviewed Preprints model are often mentioned together because both grew out of the same broader shift toward preprint-first, review-decoupled-from-acceptance publishing sometimes called the Publish-Review-Curate approach. They are not the same mechanism, however:

• eLife reviews for itself. A manuscript submitted to eLife is reviewed by eLife’s own editors and reviewers, and the Reviewed Preprint is published on eLife’s own platform with an eLife assessment. There is no onward transfer to a different journal built into the model — the Reviewed Preprint itself is eLife’s citable output.
• Review Commons reviews on behalf of many potential journals. A manuscript reviewed at Review Commons has not yet been directed to any specific outlet. The review is designed from the outset to be portable to whichever affiliate journal the author subsequently chooses, including eLife itself, which is one of Review Commons’ affiliate journals.

In practice, an author with a life-sciences manuscript can encounter both models on the same project: reviewing first at Review Commons, then transferring the Refereed Preprint to eLife (or another affiliate) for that journal’s own downstream decision.

What this means operationally for authors and research offices

• Timeline. A single round of review at Review Commons, followed by an expedited decision at the receiving journal, can be faster overall than reviewing separately at two or three journals in sequence after successive rejections — though Review Commons does not eliminate the receiving journal’s own decision timeline.
• Discipline scope. Review Commons is scoped to the life sciences; authors outside that scope should look at discipline-appropriate alternatives, including journal-specific Registered Reports or preprint servers with their own review layers.
• Interaction with prior-publication policies. Because Review Commons is built around preprints, the same considerations covered in CASRAI’s guide on avoiding a “prior publication” conflict before journal submission apply: affiliate journals participating in Review Commons have explicitly agreed that a preprint, and now a Refereed Preprint, does not count as prior publication for their purposes, but a journal outside the affiliate network may have a different policy.
• Manuscript and review exchange infrastructure. Passing a manuscript, its reviews, and an author response cleanly between systems is the same general interoperability problem that NISO MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach) was built to standardize across the publishing industry; portable-review initiatives like Review Commons are part of the reason that kind of standardized transfer has become more operationally important, whether or not any specific platform uses MECA itself.
• Record-keeping. A Refereed Preprint is a citable output in its own right once posted to bioRxiv, independent of whether or where it is eventually formally published — something a research office tracking a researcher’s outputs for reporting purposes should account for.

Frequently asked questions

Is Review Commons only for the life sciences?

Yes. Review Commons was built for, and its affiliate journals sit within, the life sciences. It is not a general-purpose portable-review platform for all disciplines.

Does using Review Commons guarantee acceptance at an affiliate journal?

No. The affiliate journal still makes its own independent editorial decision. What Review Commons changes is that the journal has agreed to use the existing reports as its starting point rather than commissioning a full new review, which typically shortens the path to a decision.

Is Review Commons free for authors?

Review Commons launched, and has continued to operate, without charging authors a submission fee. Authors should confirm current terms directly on reviewcommons.org, since fee policies at any platform can change.

How is Review Commons different from ordinary open peer review?

Openness (whether reviewer identities or reports are disclosed) and portability (whether reviews are tied to one journal or can move with the manuscript) are separate dimensions. See CASRAI’s comparison of single-blind, double-blind, and open peer review for the openness dimension; Review Commons’ distinguishing feature is portability across publishers, which is a different axis entirely and can, in principle, be combined with any openness model.

What happens if an author doesn’t want to use any affiliate journal after review?

Because the review happens independently of any journal commitment, authors are not obligated to submit to an affiliate journal at all. The Refereed Preprint remains posted and citable regardless of where, or whether, the manuscript is subsequently formally published.

For the broader landscape this platform sits within, see CASRAI’s guides on peer review generally, preprint servers, and why peer review matters when choosing where to submit.