eLife New Model at Six Months: An ICOR analysis
eLife New Model at Six Months: An ICOR analysis
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Category Archives: oa.elife
eLife introduces new process to simplify publication fee payments for authors
“eLife has introduced a system that aims to simplify the payment process for authors who submit their preprints to its new model for publishing.
The system will mean that authors can focus on the submission of their work to eLife without having to worry about handling fee invoices as part of the process. While it is currently in place for authors with a major contribution from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) laboratory, eLife plans to open it up to those from other research institutions over the coming months….
When eligible authors send their work to eLife, they can simply declare their affiliation during the submission process, and HHMI will handle the invoice on their behalf through a centralised account if the paper is sent for review….”
Why preprint review is the way forward | Research Information
“However their growth in popularity has also highlighted a lack of systems of review around preprints that mean readers cannot easily assess the quality of new findings. This is the great opportunity for the future of research communication – bringing expert peer review and curation to the preprint literature.
A number of organisations are now doing just that, by embracing models that combine the speed and openness of preprints with expert peer review, full publication and curation. Some of them – eLife and Biophysics Colab, for example – are working with a shared vision in mind: a publishing ecosystem in which the significance of research is recognised on its own merits and independently of journal title. Some other models – including those used by PREreview and ASAPbio–SciELO Preprints crowd review – also take advantage of the open nature of preprints to enable researchers from groups traditionally underrepresented in science to participate in public review.
A few examples of these organisations and their respective models are described below. Together they represent significant community efforts to bring review and curation to preprints, and show how alternative models could work in a more open future for research….”
Non-executive Director (Scientific) | Jobs | eLife
“Joining the eight-member Board, the Director will help determine eLife’s strategic priorities and provide effective challenges to the eLife Senior Management Team. They will also assist in developing policy, and maintaining high standards of probity within eLife.
We are looking for a practising senior research scientist with experience of open science, governance (at institutional or board level) and a desire to improve the scholarly communications landscape. We are particularly interested in hearing from researchers working outside Europe (due to geographic location of existing Directors)….”
Public access to published science is under threat in the US | InPublishing
Eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill’s draft language.
Frontiers says The US House Appropriations Committee has released its 2024 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. It proposes new spending of $58 billion and seeks to “rein in the Washington bureaucracy by right-sizing agencies and programs.”
A group of eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the bill’s draft language. If enacted, it would block federally funded research from being freely available to American taxpayers without delay on publication.
Individual Americans would be prevented from seeing the full benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research they fund each year via taxes. Science for the few who can access it – as opposed to the many who pay for it – is inefficient as scientific or democratic governmental policy.
eLife and PREreview to enhance the ‘publish, review, curate’ ecosystem through adoption of COAR Notify | For the press | eLife
“eLife and PREreview are pleased to announce that the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) will provide them with technical and funding support to implement the COAR Notify technology. With this support, the organisations will work to connect separate services within the ‘publish, review, curate’ ecosystem.
The project will put in place the basic infrastructure and protocols needed for all-round and standardised connections between preprint repositories, community-led preprint review platforms, journals, and preprint review aggregation and curation platforms. The aim is to lower existing technological and cost barriers so that as many of these services as possible can more easily participate in the ‘publish, review, curate’ future for research….”
eLife and PREreview to enhance the ‘publish, review, curate’ ecosystem through adoption of COAR Notify | For the press | eLife
“eLife and PREreview are pleased to announce that the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) will provide them with technical and funding support to implement the COAR Notify technology. With this support, the organisations will work to connect separate services within the ‘publish, review, curate’ ecosystem.
The project will put in place the basic infrastructure and protocols needed for all-round and standardised connections between preprint repositories, community-led preprint review platforms, journals, and preprint review aggregation and curation platforms. The aim is to lower existing technological and cost barriers so that as many of these services as possible can more easily participate in the ‘publish, review, curate’ future for research….”
eLife’s New Model: Initial three-month update | Inside eLife | eLife
“eLife’s new approach to publishing has been open for submissions since the end of January this year. During that time, we’ve been encouraged by the positive feedback from the scientific community and there has been a lot of interest in how it’s working and what we are learning behind the scenes.
To monitor the progress of the new model, we are working with the team at Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR) to analyse the data we are collecting with regards to submissions, disciplines and attitudes towards publishing. ICOR is building a collaborative research culture by strategising, connecting and implementing projects that seek to change the status quo of competition throughout the research cycle.
In this joint blog, we review what we have seen in the first three months* and reflect on what we have learnt so far. It has always been our intention to be transparent about the rollout of the new model and so, whilst this is very early data which we cannot draw firm conclusions from, we felt it was important to share at this stage. We plan to reflect a much fuller picture six months from the launch when we have collected more representative data….’
eLife’s New Model: A statement from our board | Inside eLife | eLife
“In response to a Nature News Feature published March 17, eLife’s Board of Directors has issued the following letter of support for our new publishing model and leadership: …
The decision to evolve eLife to the new publishing model was made by eLife’s board. It was not a decision made by any individual employee of eLife. At the board’s behest, the staff of eLife and members of the editorial team have worked hard over several years – and continue to do so today – to make this transition possible….
A key decision was to evolve eLife itself, rather than experiment with a new journal….”
A suggestion for eLife
“I have a simple suggestion for how to counteract such a concern, and that is that the journal should adopt a different criterion for deciding which papers to review – this should be done solely on the basis of the introduction and methods, without any knowledge of the results. Editors could also be kept unaware of the identity of authors.
If eLife wants to achieve a distinctive reputation for quality, it could do so by only taking forward to review those articles that have identified an interesting question and tackled it with robust methodology. It’s well-known that editors and reviewers tend to be strongly swayed by novel and unexpected results, and will disregard methodological weaknesses if the findings look exciting. If authors had to submit a results-blind version of the manuscript in the first instance, then I predict that the initial triage by editors would look rather different. The question for the editor would no longer be one about the kind of review the paper would generate, but would focus rather on whether this was a well-conducted study that made the editor curious to know what the results would look like. The papers that subsequently appeared in eLife would look different to those in its high-profile competitors, such as Nature and Science, but in a good way. Those ultra-exciting but ultimately implausible papers would get filtered out, leaving behind only those that could survive being triaged solely on rationale and methods.”
Strife at eLife: inside a journal’s quest to upend science publishing
“Last October, the pioneering life-sciences journal eLife introduced bold changes to its editorial practice — which some researchers applauded as reimagining the purpose of a scientific journal. From 31 January this year, eLife said, it would publish every paper it sent out for peer review: authors would never again receive a rejection after a negative review. Instead, reviewers’ reports would be published alongside the paper, together with a short editorial assessment of the work’s significance and rigour. Authors could then decide whether to revise their paper to address any comments.
The change followed an earlier decision by eLife to require that all submissions be posted as preprints online. The cumulative effect was to turn eLife into a producer of public reviews and assessments about online research. It was “relinquishing the traditional journal role of gatekeeper”, editor-in-chief Michael Eisen explained in a press release, and “promoting the evaluation of scientists based on what, rather than where, they publish”….”
Publisher’s Perspective on Open Access
Several publisher presentations on how they support OA. One from eLife, the others from for-profit and hybrid publishers.
A new approach to peer review or scholarly publishing – 2023 – Journal of Food Science – Wiley Online Library
“In last month’s column, I spoke about preprint sites as a possible future direction of note for our journals. At the end of that editorial, I said I would talk about eLife since this journal is doing several things quite different, some of which may be of interest to JFS….
eLife editors argue that the “new model combines the immediacy and openness of preprints with the scrutiny of peer review by experts.” Will this approach to scholarly publication take root? There are certainly some interesting concepts for us to consider….”
View of What is the Future of Preprint Peer Review?
“Another organization that is blurring the lines between preprint review and journals is eLife. eLife is an open access journal funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Society. It has required all authors to post preprints since 2020 but recently took the bold step of re-defining itself as a peer review service: eLife no longer accepts or rejects papers it considers; it simply peer reviews them and posts the reports online alongside the preprint.7 PLOS Biology has also experimented with preprint peer review by asking editors to consider both formal peer reviews and unsolicited comments on bioRxiv preprints they are considering for publication.
Preprint peer review thus encompasses a spectrum of activities from informal commenting to new services that can augment or potentially displace journals in the research ecosystem. Perhaps most significantly it prompts us to consider what peer review is and what it should be. Journal peer review is currently mostly concentrated among a small fraction of senior scientists who are overloaded and not representative of the global potential reviewer pool. ECRs are not often involved, nor are scientists from the Global South. Preprint peer review provides an opportunity to involve a more diverse sample of the scientific community. Increasing the representation of researchers from marginalized groups and the Global South in the review of clinical research could boost fields like neglected tropical diseases and socio-economic determinants of health. And since decoupled review is not exclusive or restricted to a single point in time, it could provide the basis for a new, more multi-dimensional approach to the evaluation of scientific research…”
Biophysics Colab shifting to full ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ service for authors
“Biophysics Colab is pleased to announce that it will shift to a full ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ (PRC) model later this year. Their expanded service will provide authors with an alternative option to traditional journals for the review and dissemination of their work.?
Biophysics Colab is an international collaboration of biophysicists working to improve the way original research is evaluated. The group has been running a preprint review trial since 2019, which has proved popular among authors due to its service-oriented approach that focuses wholly on authors’ best interests. Now, Biophysics Colab is building upon this service by giving authors the option to create a final ‘version of record’ – equivalent to a journal article – after peer review of their preprint. This curation step will complete Biophysics Colab’s vision of a community-run PRC service, originally inspired by a proposal from Stern and O’Shea*….
Biophysics Colab is the first endeavour of the open science publishing initiative, Science Colab – a non-profit, community-run project supported by eLife, with a mission to add value and credibility to the scientific literature in a way that supports and benefits the community. Both Science Colab and the non-profit eLife share a similar vision of a publishing ecosystem in which the significance of research is recognised independently of journal title….
The collaboratory will soon begin to formally validate reviewed preprints as versions of record – a citable record of the final version of the work. However, authors submitting preprints to Biophysics Colab will remain in control of their study, choosing when to declare it as final. This reflects eLife’s new publishing model and makes Biophysics Colab the first group to adopt a flavour of it….”