Open Peer Reviewers in Africa

Eider Africa, PREreview, AfricArXiv, and the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) are working together on a new peer-review training program for early to mid-career researchers in Africa, facilitated by eLife. The course aims to raise awareness around preprints and invite African researchers/scholars to the open review of preprints.

The project is based on the commitment of all partnering institutions to bring greater diversity to the peer-review process and equip African scholars with expertise in high-quality peer review standards and practices while ,at the same time, sensitising for Africa-specific challenges in the scholarly system with a particular focus on peer review.

African researchers were invited to join a path of guided learning to build their profile as constructive peer reviewers. The organisers chose a ‘train the trainer’ model, where the first cohort of researchers was given the opportunity to learn how to instruct others in peer review. The participants adapted the training materials to their own context and delivered the workshop to their own research communities.

• Trainer guide - https://zenodo.org/record/7145089

• Module I - https://zenodo.org/record/7145170

• Module II - https://zenodo.org/record/7145213

• Module III template - https://zenodo.org/record/7145274

• Assignment document module III - https://zenodo.org/record/7145288

• Open-Peer-Reviewers-in-Africa-English

• Open-Peer-Reviewers-in-Africa-Arabic

• Open-Peer-Reviewers-in-Africa-French

• To read more about eLife and PREreview’s partnership to promote greater diversity in peer review, see https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/3071bfea/elife-and-prereview-partner-to-promote-greater-diversity-in-peer-review.

• To read more about AfricArxiv, TCC Africa, Eider Africa, and PREreview’s perspectives around the importance of building community and increasing peer-reviewing capacity among African researchers, visit https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/08/23/guest-post-best-practices-and-innovative-approaches-to-peer-review-in-africa, and to access video recordings of co-hosted events: https://africarxiv.pubpub.org/pub/o4u5mm2f/release/8 and https://info.africarxiv.org/african-perspectives-on-peer-review-a-roundtable-discussion.

• To read more about PREreview Communities, see https://content.prereview.org/introducing-prereview-communities.

• For more information about groups on Sciety, visit https://sciety.org/groups.

ABOUT THE PARTNERS

Eider Africa is an organization that conducts research, co-designs, and implements collaboratively, offline, and online research mentorship programs for scholars in Africa. We train mentors to start their mentorship programs. We believe in peer-to-peer learning, learning research by practice, caring for the whole researcher, and lifelong learning. We have grown a vibrant community of researchers in our research journal clubs and work with university lecturers to develop transformative inclusive research training. Our website: https://eiderafricaltd.org/

The Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) is the first African-based training center to teach effective communication skills to scientists. TCC Africa is an award-winning Trust, established as a non-profit entity in 2006 and is registered in Kenya.  TCC Africa provides capacity support in improving researchers’ output and visibility through training in scholarly and science communication. Find out more about TCC Africa at https://www.tcc-africa.org/about.

PREreview is an open project fiscally sponsored by the non-profit organization Code for Science and Society. Our mission is to bring more equity and transparency to the scholarly peer-review process. We design and develop open-source infrastructure to enable constructive feedback to preprints, we run peer review mentoring and training programs, and we partner with like-minded organizations to organize events providing opportunities for researchers to create meaningful collaborations and connections defeating cultural and geographical barriers. Learn more about PREreview at https://prereview.org.

eLife is a non-profit organization created by funders and led by researchers. Our mission is to accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognizes the most responsible behaviors. We seek to promote a research culture that supports collaboration, diversity and inclusion, and openness, and we support preprints and open-science practices. eLife receives financial support and strategic guidance from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society, and Wellcome. Learn more at https://elifesciences.org/about.

AfricArXiv is a community-led digital archive for African research, working towards building an African-owned open scholarly repository; a knowledge commons of African scholarly works to catalyze the African Renaissance. We partner with established scholarly repository services to provide a platform for African scientists of any discipline to present their research findings and connect with other researchers on the African continent and globally. Find out more about AfricArXiv at https://info.africarxiv.org/