"The rapidly growing volume of academic papers is outpacing the scientific community’s ability to critically evaluate them. This makes it increasingly important to equip the next generation of researchers with the skills that they need to become peer reviewers.
But formal curricula rarely include these skills. Universities invest years in teaching students how to design experiments and analyse data, but leave peer-review training mostly to informal mentorship.
So, how do early-career researchers — especially students and postdocs — learn to develop a critical eye?
Preprints offer a valuable opportunity for trainees to practise reviewing manuscripts outside the formal journal-review process, and several initiatives have been established with this in mind."
