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The EU wants to remove traditional publishers from scientific publishing, and replace their role in peer review with an open standard they call Publish, Review, Curate (PRC). (www.nature.com)
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By early November, the European Commission will roll out an expanded version of its Open Research Europe (ORE) platform, which uses a ‘publish, review, curate’ model. In this approach, preprints are posted, reviewed openly — with the identity of the reviewers and their reports made public — then flagged as ‘peer reviewed’ on the same platform.

The idea here is to separate the publication, peer-review and evaluation of scientific research from the traditional academic journals that have historically controlled all three.

At the moment, much of the scientific publishing industry is built on a rather strange arrangement: research is largely paid for with public money, academics often carry out peer reviews for free, and universities then pay huge subscription fees to commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature to access the results.

If this new model catches on it could seriously disrupt that arrangement, make scientific research much more accessible and change the way academic work is evaluated and recognized.

Preprint-centric publishing model gets major boost: European funders put weight behind emerging ‘publish, review, curate’ approach for preprints.

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[–] 6 points 1 day ago

I definitely like the option for reviews to be open, but there are certainly pros and cons to having only open reviews.

As a reviewer, you are expected to work for free. If reviews are blind, the reviewer doesnt need to spend huge amounts of unpaid labor to review to the best of their ability, because the accuracy of the content ultimately is dependent on the authors of the paper. If your name is associated as a reviewer, though, there is likely more pressure to perform a good review (for free), lest an error slip through that you get blamed for. There are a lot of things that you are also just not necessarily equipped to double check as a reviewer, like if an author fabricated something. It's not like you can retrospectively audit their whole process. This will likely cut down on the number of people willing to perform reviews.

Additionally, many fields are pretty niche communities where everyone knows everyone, and there can be professional ramifications to giving someone a bad review, like harmed collaborations, or tit-for-tat bad reviews back on your work.

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