An exciting year of open, community-driven evaluation of metaresearch

One year ago, the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) and the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS) launched MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review), a community-owned platform designed to transform how metaresearch is shared, reviewed, and evaluated.

Today, as we mark MetaROR’s first anniversary, we’re celebrating what the community has built together: faster, more transparent peer review, growing adoption of open research practices, and a strong sense of collective ownership across the metaresearch community.

Why MetaROR? Addressing key challenges in peer review

In recent years, the field of metaresearch has expanded rapidly, with new communities, methods, and ambitions. This growth has highlighted long-standing challenges: disciplines that rarely interact, paywalls that restrict who can read or publish, mounting pressure on overstretched peer reviewers, and commercial journal practices that are inconsistent with our community values.

MetaROR was created because metaresearch, more than any other field, has a responsibility to adopt more efficient, more transparent, and more equitable scholarly communication practices.

An innovative model: Publish → Review → Curate

MetaROR operates using the Publish-Review-Curate model. Interest in this model is rapidly growing, with dedicated events and strong support from research funders. MetaROR’s adoption of Publish-Review-Curate builds on pioneering work by eLife, Peer Community In, Kotahi, and several other initiatives.

Publish

Authors share their article on a preprint server or repository (e.g., arXiv, bioRxiv, MetaArXiv, PsyArXiv) and then submit their work to MetaROR. This means research is publicly available immediately.

Review

Editors invite expert reviewers.
Reviews are open, citable (with DOIs), and are  often followed by author responses.
Reviewers are encouraged to sign their names but may also remain anonymous.

Curate

Instead of a binary accept/reject decision, editors publish an editorial assessment that synthesises the perspectives of the reviewers on an article’s key strengths and weaknesses.

Alexander Schniedermann, who submitted to MetaROR, said:

“The Publish-Review-Curate model brings reviewing and editorial decision making into the open. Its dynamic nature reminds authors to care for what they write and share. To me, it can become a real game changer in scholarly communication. I got great peer reviews and look forward to revise my manuscript!”

Serhii Nazarovets, author of another MetaROR submission, commented:

“Open review takes time, but it’s worth every week for the transparency and trust it brings.”

MetaROR’s first year in numbers

Over the past year, MetaROR completed the evaluation of 28 articles, with growing interest and support from the community and a gradual increase in submissions each month. Peer review for all submissions was organised by our editors-in-chief, Kathryn Zeiler and Ludo Waltman, in close collaboration with the other members of the editorial team.

Across the year, 59 reviewers provided high-quality constructive reviews, reporting positive experiences with the process. Their contributions have been invaluable not only to authors but also to the community. 90% of the reviewers chose to disclose their identity, demonstrating a strong commitment to transparency.

Reviewers consistently completed their assessments on time, with 9 out of the 10 most recent evaluations published prior to the platform’s target. This contributed to a noticeably faster reviewing cycle compared with traditional journals, a strong indication that open, community-driven evaluation models can be both rigorous and efficient.

MetaROR now has 9 partner journals, with more to follow. The increasing interest shows that journals are recognising the value of transparent reviews and community oversight, especially for interdisciplinary fields like metaresearch.

MetaROR has gained visibility in over a dozen media articles, some of them highlighted on our website, and has been showcased at various academic events over the year, including the Metascience 2025 conference and the STI-ENID 2025 conference.

Several authors have also shared their positive experiences with MetaROR. This includes Chris Marcum, who was formerly at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Hans de Jonge and Jeroen Sondervan from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Looking ahead

In its first year, MetaROR has shown that community governance, open review, and collaborative curation can meaningfully improve scholarly communication. Over the next year, we will focus on expanding participation, refining our workflows based on community feedback, strengthening our community governance, and developing additional partnerships with journals.

We also hope that MetaROR’s Publish-Review-Curate model will contribute to broader changes in the way research is assessed. We are developing initiatives in this area, guided by the lessons learned in a research project that we are currently carrying out in collaboration with several research funders in the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).

MetaROR is still young, but it has already demonstrated what is possible when researchers take ownership of how their work is shared and evaluated.