While the need to publish creates huge inertia for scholars to move away from the current paradigm, Authorea provides an excellent testbed to experiment with Open Peer Review. A first experiment of this kind is underway: a paper written on Authorea was submitted to a major journal and, on the same day, to the well known preprint repository arXiv. This is not news, and it’s done routinely by many scholars every day.

However, while the arXiv is a great tool for sharing research before it’s published or reviewed, users can’t comment or leave feedback on the content. That’s why the arXiv preprint was linked to its Authorea version, where readers can leave feedback using a powerful commenting system - and even link “discussion” or “response” documents to the original content.

So ultimately, the place where the paper was written becomes the place where the paper is discussed by the community. Since Authorea is also built for transparency and reproducibility – it allows you to include the data and code used during the research process – it is the ideal place for an effective review to take place. This makes the review process more natural and seamless. The feedback left on Authorea becomes part of the paper itself. Doubts raised by an open reviewer can be answered by the authors and the wider community. Ideas or suggestions become commentaries that can trigger future collaborations and investigations.

At the end of the day, all this work is not lost and scatter. Credit can be acknowledged and distributed. And best of all, everything connected to the document (the text, data, code, figures, reviews, comments, future directions taken, etc.) becomes part of the legacy of the paper.