Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

An intriguing hypothesis, first suggested by Tim Berners-Lee, is that the structure of online groups should conform to a power law distribution. We relate this hypothesis to earlier work around the Dunbar Number, which is a supposed limit to the number of social contacts a user can have in a group. As preliminary results, we show that the number of contacts of a typical Flickr user, the number of groups a user belongs to, and the size of Flickr groups all follow power law distributions. Furthermore, we find some unexpected differences in the internal structure of public and private Flickr groups. For further research, we further operationalize the Berners-Lee hypothesis to suppose that users with a group membership distribution that follows a power law will produce more content for social Web systems.