Seminar
Crossing the Chasm: The Publish-Review-Curate Model and the Future of Peer Review
- Date
- Friday 18 September 2026
- Time
- Series
- CWTS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Willem Einthoven
Kolffpad 1
2333 BN Leiden - Room
- Online & common rooms at CWTS
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Conventional pre-publication peer review faces systemic challenges: reviewer shortage, protracted cycles, persistent biases, and costs exceeding 100 million researcher hours annually. As manuscripts outpace review capacity, the question is not whether peer review needs reform, but which innovations are gaining traction and under what conditions.
This seminar presents a taxonomy of peer review innovations extending Waltman, Kaltenbrunner, and colleagues' (2023) framework with a third, more granular tier (Kochetkov, 2026). It maps four schools of thought (Quality and Reproducibility, Democracy and Transparency, Equity and Inclusion, and Efficiency and Incentives) onto four operational models: conventional editorial review, registered reports, modular publishing, and Publish-Review-Curate (PRC).
PRC emerges as the most promising innovation: decoupling dissemination from certification, it turns peer review from gatekeeping into open scientific discourse. Its adoption, however, remains at the Early Adopters stage of Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle. The seminar examines conditions for crossing the chasm that may determine whether PRC scales from niche experiment to de facto standard. The seminar aligns with the Peer Review Week 2026 theme, "Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality," by connecting innovation adoption directly to the capacity challenges facing the global research enterprise.
Suggested reading
Kochetkov, D. (2026). Peer Review at the Crossroads. Learned Publishing, 39(2), e2046.
Kochetkov, D. (2026, August 7). Guest Post—Do we need (r)evolution in peer review? The Scholarly Kitchen.
About the speaker
Dmitry Kochetkov is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, working at the intersection of research evaluation, scholarly communication, and science policy. He studies research assessment frameworks, university rankings, and evolving publishing practices such as preprinting and open peer review. He is committed to building a more transparent, equitable, and accountable scholarly ecosystem.