New PCI communities for more open science
April 29 2026Three new Peer Community In (PCI) communities have been launched thanks to the involvement of researchers from AgroParisTech-joint units: PCI Plants, PCI Statistics and Machine Learning, and PCI Nutrition. They join the ranks of existing communities, underscoring the vitality of a local scientific ecosystem centered around this initiative, which is reinventing scientific publishing.
Researchers taking back control of scientific publishing
In response to the increasingly expensive cost of traditional scientific publishing—which sometimes makes the very possibility of publication dependent on the resources available to a researcher—Peer Community In offers a model based on equity. The platform is a nonprofit organization, financially supported by academic institutions, with no profit motive beyond covering operating costs. Every contribution, whether from a reviewer or an editor, is made visible, documented, and associated with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), unlike in traditional journals where this work remains invisible. The initiative is based on the facilitation of peer communities and is supported by several French doctoral schools, including ABIES for AgroParisTech.
Quality, transparency, and openness at the heart of the process
PCI prioritize scientific rigor over the popularity of results: submitted work is evaluated based on its intrinsic quality rather than its presumed impact, paving the way for the publication of negative results or replication studies, which are still too often rejected by traditional journals. The peer-review process is entirely transparent and follows explicit criteria. The data and code associated with submitted research must be accessible and subject to independent verification, thus ensuring the reproducibility of the work.
“The goal of PCI is to establish a rigorous, open, free, and universally accessible peer-review system, in order to offer an alternative to private scientific publications, which are often expensive. ” emphasizes Rafael Muñoz-Tamayo, research director at the joint research unit Applied Systemic Modeling for Ruminants - MoSAR (AgroParisTech, INRAE, Université Paris-Saclay).
Three new PCI launched within the AgroParisTech units
Three new communities have recently been launched with the direct involvement of members from joint research units coordinated by AgroParisTech:
- PCI Plants: This PCI covers plant sciences, ranging from cell biology to plant ecology (UMR Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin)
- PCI Statistics and Machine Learning: this PCI is dedicated to statistical methods and machine learning applied to the sciences (UMR Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Paris-Saclay)
- PCI Nutrition: This PCI aims to comprehensively cover research in human nutrition (UMR Physiology of Nutrition and Eating Behavior - PNCA)
These three communities join the already active PCIs led by researchers at AgroParisTech: Animal Science, Ecotoxicology, and Forest and Wood Sciences.
How to get involved in a PCI?
Researchers are invited to join this ecosystem in various ways. They can submit a preprint for review by a PCI in their discipline: this is an opportunity to receive in-depth and transparent feedback before formal publication. It is also possible to serve as a reviewer, thereby actively contributing to the quality of scientific output within one’s community and receiving the recognition that comes with it, since each review is public and associated with a permanent identifier. Those most committed can also join the editorial board of an existing PCI, or even spearhead the creation of a new community if their discipline is not yet represented among the twenty or so active PCIs to date.