Table 2. Advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches to peer review.

Note that combinations of these approaches can co-exist. NPRC: Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.

Type	Description	Pros/Benefits	Cons/Risks	Examples
Pre-peer review commenting	Informal commenting and discussion on a publicly available pre-publication manuscript draft (i.e., preprints)	Rapid, transparent, public, relatively low cost (free for authors), open commenting	Variable uptake, fear of scooping, fear of journal rejection, fear of premature communication, no editorial control	bioRxiv, OSF Preprints, PeerJ Preprints, Figshare, Zenodo, Preprints.org
Pre-publication (closed)	Formal and editorially-invited evaluation of a piece of research by selected experts in the relevant field	Editorial moderation, provides at least some form of quality control for all published work	Mostly non-transparent, difficult to evaluate, potentially biased, secretive and exclusive, unclear who “owns” reviews	Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The Lancet
Post-publication	Formal and optionally-invited evaluation of research by selected experts in the relevant field, subsequent to publication	Rapid publication of research, public, transparent, can be editorially-moderated, continuous	Filtering of “bad research” occurs after publication, relatively low uptake	F1000 Research, ScienceOpen, RIO, The Winnower, Publons
Post-publication commenting	Informal discussion of published research, independent of any formal peer review that may have already occurred	Can be performed on third-party platforms, anyone can contribute, public	Comments can be rude or of low quality, comments across multiple platforms lack inter-operability, low visibility, low uptake	PubMed Commons, PeerJ, PLOS, BMJ
Collaborative	A combination of referees, editors and external readers participate in the assessment of scientific manuscripts through interactive comments, often to reach a consensus decision, and a single set of revisions	Iterative, transparent, editors sign reports, can be integrated with formal process, deters low quality submissions	Can be additionally time-consuming, discussion quality variable, peer pressure and influence can tilt the balance	eLife, Frontiers series, Copernicus journals, BMJ Open Science
Portable	Authors can take referee reports to multiple consecutive venues, often administered by a third-party service	Reduces redundancy or duplication, saves time	Low uptake by authors, low acceptance by journals, high cost	BioMed Central journals, NPRC, Rubriq, Peerage of Science, MECA
Recommendation services	Post-publication evaluation and recommendation of significant articles, often through a peer- nominated consortium	Crowd-sourced literature discovery, time saving, “prestige” factor when inside a consortium	Paid services (subscription only), time consuming on recommender side, exclusive	F1000 Prime, CiteULike
Decoupled post-publication (annotation services)	Comments or highlights added directly to highlighted sections of the work. Added notes can be private or public	Rapid, crowd-sourced and collaborative, cross-publisher, low threshold for entry	Non-interoperable, multiple venues, effort duplication, relatively unused, genuine critiques reserved	PubPeer, Hypothesis, PaperHive, PeerLibrary