Ark Communities

At the heart of The Ark are Communities - groups of users who are focused on a particular topic or field of research; or who have an existing association, such as a society, lab or research institute.

We recommend that the first thing you do after registering is explore communities on The Ark.

Why join a community?

Whilst everything is open to read on The Ark, to participate you need to be a member of a Community - therefore if you want to request feedback from a community, or want to give feedback to a preprint in a community, you’ll need to become a member.

Most communities are open, meaning anyone can immediately join just by clicking the “Join” link:

Some communities have chosen to moderate their membership - in these cases, you’ll need to Request to Join:

Clicking this link will send a request to the Community Moderator who will review your request as soon as possible.

Once you are a Community Member, you can request feedback from that community, and give feedback on preprints that are associated with that community.

Community Settings

By default, communities are open and permissive. This means that:

• Anyone can join the community
• Any community member can post a review report
• Authors can invite feedback from specific individuals
• Reviewer identity is completely open and reviews can be read by anyone
• Requests for community feedback from members are automatically approved

Communities can decide to change these settings but must provide good reason for doing so.

The entire history of a preprint and any community decisions or feedback in The Ark is recorded and travels with the preprint.

Want to launch your own community?

You can apply to launch your own community on The Ark - if you think your field of interest isn’t covered, or you want to create a very specific community for either a type of researcher or reader. Start by clicking this button on the Communities page.

You’ll be redirected to a form which will ask you to provide:

• A Community Name
• An outline of the scope
• The name of at least three people (including you) who are willing to be actively involved in managing the Community (see “Community Roles” for what this involvement entails)
• Any organisational relationships with the Community (e.g. a journal, society, university, funder etc).
• Any other notes you’d like the be considered

This will be reviewed by The Ark admin team, who will aim to get back to you within 7 days.

Community Roles

There are key roles within a Community that help it function efficiently and remain vibrant. Multiple members can hold the same role, and a single member can hold more than one role; however, we require that at least three members are appointed to one or more roles to ensure that the community is dynamic and active.

• Community Curators, who review the feedback provided by a community to assess whether they endorse a preprint.
• Community Moderators, who manage feedback and membership requests (if a community has opted to moderate these requests)
• Discovery Editors, who explore and highlight new preprints on other preprint servers using our tool, opensci prefind.