{"doi":"10.1242/dmm.050717","title":"Valuing peer review at Disease Models & Mechanisms","abstract":"To what extent should peer review be a requirement for publication in Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM)? Last year, at a meeting of the Board of Directors of The Company of Biologists, this provocative question was raised in the context of an informal discussion about preprint servers, which enable authors to distribute their work prior to peer review. My immediate reaction was that of course we need peer review! But the question has stayed with me and challenged me to understand and articulate exactly how peer review serves authors and readers at DMM, and how we can improve this process.In recent years, preprint servers have emerged as a mechanism for authors to disseminate their own work directly, without a journal publisher. This can be especially beneficial for work funded by charities and the taxpayer, and for early-career researchers and researchers in low- and middle-income countries, because distribution is immediate, free and not defined by the scope of specific journals or publishers (Sarabipour et al., 2019; as described in an article for University World News by Maina Waruru). Rather than formal peer review, readers can directly comment on the interpretation of the data or analysis, and the authors can choose whether or how to respond. In a recent study, it was reported that 7.3% of preprints in bioRxiv and medRxiv from 2020 had some form of comments and that these were similar to the quality of comments in peer review (Carneiro et al., 2023). Preprint servers, including region-specific servers such as AfricArXiv, can help provide visibility for research from low- and middle-income countries, which might struggle with discoverability and the costs of research publishing (article for University World News by Maina Waruru). However, the sharing of data prior to peer review is not without risk, and there can be a direct harm to the field and to the public when low-quality, flawed or even fraudulent studies are posted on preprint servers, as, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic (Gopalakrishna, 2021). One solution to this is Review Commons, which provides authors with a refereed preprint that can be posted to bioRxiv, as well as the facilitated transfer of the manuscript and reviews to affiliated journals, including DMM and some of its sister journals.So, as an independent not-for-profit publisher within a highly competitive landscape, what service do we provide authors when they choose to publish their papers with us? Does peer review provide a necessary part of the scientific process or an unnecessary speedbump to dissemination? Might the new eLife model, which enables authors to choose which, if any revisions they perform, be preferred for our editors and authors? I took these questions to the annual DMM Editor meeting in London this past October.First, we discussed our experience with peer review. As academic editors at DMM and practicing scientists whose own work undergoes scrutiny, our discussion was shaped by our dual perspective. We have found that, since the pandemic, academics are finding an increase in their workload, and it can take longer to secure appropriate reviewers. At DMM, we aim for three reviewers for each article, but if we have two reviewers who can sufficiently cover the experimental range of the work, we can move forward. We are also noticing that, again since the pandemic, reviewers need more time to complete reviews, and we are generally happy to accommodate this and try to keep the authors informed. This stage is the longest in the process, and we are mindful that although authors are anxious to receive the reviews as soon as possible, the reviewers are good-will volunteers (Aczel et al., 2021). To address concerns about publishing times, The Company of Biologists is discussing innovative publishing models that include rapid review and compensating reviewers. Some of the ways we support and incentivise reviewers at The Company of Biologists' journals are outlined in Box 1. From our surv","journal":"Disease Models & Mechanisms","year":2024,"id":489841,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9543,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":356749,"name":"E. Elizabeth Patton","orcid":"0000-0002-2570-0834","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":18,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:08:28.548530Z","pmid":"38288887","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}