Brandon Stell and Boris Barbour’s PubPeer Wins the 200.000€’s Einstein Award

The Einstein Foundation has awarded its prestigious 2024 Institutional Award to PubPeer, the post-publication peer review platform co-founded by SPPIN’s Brandon Stell and IBENS’s Boris Barbour. The foundation award, in collaboration with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, recognizes PubPeer’s transformative impact on scientific communication and research integrity. This recognition has a particular resonance at SPPIN, where Brandon Stell co-leads the Cerebellar Neurophysiology team.

Since its launch in 2012, PubPeer has become an essential platform for scientific discourse, logging over 300,000 comments across all academic domains. The platform enables researchers to openly discuss published work, identify potential issues, and improve scientific rigor.

Dorothy Bishop, Emeritus Professor at Oxford University who nominated PubPeer, emphasized its crucial role: “Having discussions out in the open makes a big difference to the quality of scientific debate.” Bernard Poulain, of CNRS Biology, commended the award: “It honours your commitment to the research community by encouraging transparent and open discussion of published scientific reports.”

The €200,000 award will support PubPeer’s future development, including initiatives to foster user communities and expand scientific discussions beyond fraud detection to broader research evaluation.

PubPeer shares the 2024 Einstein Foundation honors with individual award winner Elisabeth Bik and early career recipients Pixelquality (Christopher Schmied and Helena Jambor).