Despite being a crucial part of science, peer review often isn’t included in university curricula. Credit: Getty

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.

PREreview , for example, is a platform on which researchers can openly review and discuss preprints.…