I want to give a little more background and detail on some of the new things we're doing at @eLife elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e… If you read this and have questions or concerns, I'd love to answer them.
The motivation for all this is that people have been talking for decades - as long as I've been in science - about how we need to move beyond journal titles in how we evaluate works of science and the scientists who carry them out. And yet, we still do, and it's getting worse.
Using a hierarchy of journals to convey what editors & reviewers think of a paper is bad: it's overly simplistic & fails to capture the multidimensionality & nuance of the assessment - it also enables a toxic culture in which people are judged by where and not what they publish.
The reliance on journal brand also empowers many publishers who are interested in profits over science to charge obscene fees to access their contents, leading to us spending $10b/year on a publishing system that still locks ~70% of its content behind paywalls.
There have been some interesting experiments with alternative systems - most notably @F1000Prime. But they haven't taken off yet in large part, I think, because they complement, rather than replace, assessment during peer review.
One of my main goals since becoming EIC @eLife was to try to really tackle "journal name" challenge. We've been constantly brainstorming for the last few months, working with the eLife community to think about how we can take meaningful steps in this direction.
I'm mindful of the reality that we can't ask authors to abandon the current system upon which their careers depend until we can offer them something better. So as much as I sometimes want to blow the system up, the reality is we have to work alongside the current flawed system.
But @eLife can't and shouldn't just stay the same. The status quo is simply unacceptable. If we want to be the catalyst that makes science publishing actually work well for science and scientists, we have to adapt to changes that are occurring and drive change ourselves.
The most disruptive force in science publishing today is the rise @biorxivpreprint, and it is awesome. I hope that soon all papers first appear there - when authors, not a journal, feel they're ready to share - and that we come to view posting on @biorxivpreprint as publishing.
This would be such a boon for science - making sure that we don't suffer pointless journal-induced delays in work being shared, and achieving my and many others long-fought for dream of universal free access to the scientific literature.
But universal author-driven publishing isn't enough. We need robust peer review, assessment and curation that helps scientists improve their work and its presentation, aids people find works relevant to their interest, and guides readers in interpreting the papers they choose.
We also need a way for the community to help identify important ideas and results, and to provide a fair and effective way for people to get credit for their accomplishment and to build careers based on how the community assesses their work.
The current system does all these things - some reasonably well, others poorly and unfairly. But - and this is the central guiding principle of what we're trying to do - in no aspect does it do them as well as it should, or could if we freed ourselves from journal names.
But how do we do this? How do we get people to stop looking at journal names? The first step is, I think quite obviously, to give them something else to look at, and this is one of the things our new initiatives are trying to do.
OK, Mike, you're 15 tweets in and haven's said anything about these new initiatives... get on with it.
So, we are now asking our editors to include in their acceptance letters and explanation of why they accepted the paper, written not for the authors, but for readers, potential readers, search committees and others interested in a richer evaluation of the science and authors.
There are a lot of challenges. We don't really have a language to explain these kind of decisions. And it's likely to take us some time and experimentation to figure out what that language should be.
We also don't know what the best process is - should, for example, authors be involved? Is this best done with free text alone, or is some kind of controlled vocabulary or even a kind scoring scheme more effective? Is this too much extra work for editors?
These are questions we are constantly thinking about, but in the meantime, we just want to see how different editors approach this question and then use their experiences and peoples' responses to refine the process and output and see where this takes us.
Initiative 2 is more expansive and a response to changing conditions outside of @eLife - we are going to start reviewing papers directly on @biorxivpreprint.
Here's how it will work. Anyone who posts a paper on @biorxivpreprint can submit to @eLife it via their B2J (bioRxiv to journal) system (this ensures that the manuscript we receive is the same as that posted on bioRxiv).
@biorxivpreprint @eLife They can choose the normal @eLife review process, or @PreprintReview (PR). PR manuscripts will be reviewed just like every other @eLife submission and considered for publication in the journal. But, in parallel, we will prepare and post a public review to @biorxivpreprint.
The PR will not be a decision letter - indeed it will contain no decision. Rather it will be an assessment of the paper, arrived at through @eLife's consultative review process, written for an audience of readers, potential readers and others interested in our assessment.
We will post this public review irrespective of whether we decided to publish the paper in @eLife. Some of these reviews will be positive, others less so. These PRs will point to things the reviewers like about the work, but also technical or conceptual issues they identify.
Of course the authors will have an opportunity to respond and update their work in response. If other scientists or groups want to review the paper as well, or comment on these reviews, that's great. It's the kind of public dialogue around papers we need.
In an ideal world, this would be enough - they wouldn't have to be "published" in a journal. But since we don't yet live in that world, the authors can take these @eLife reviews to any other journal to streamline the process, and eliminate the wasted time of re-review.
@eLife Why, you may ask, would anyone choose to submit their paper to this kind of public scrutiny? In one way everyone who already posts to @biorxivpreprint is already doing this, in as much as people can comment on their paper.
But we recognize that it's different when these comments come from a respected (we hope) journal. So @PreprintReview comes with a kind of carrot - we will eliminate editorial triage for papers coming in through PR.
That is, in exchange for helping @eLife move towards a new system for conveying the output of peer review - public posting on @biorxivpreprint - we will review their paper without asking up front, as we currently do, if the paper seems appropriate for @eLife.
The only caveat is that we have to be able to identify an appropriate editor to handle the paper - our editorial board is broad, but it doesn't cover all topics in all areas of biomedicine - as we don't think it's fair to authors to have papers languishing in the system.
The idea behind having a parallel system in which papers are publicly reviewed while also being considered for publication in @eLife is to allow authors to participate in something new (and we think exciting) without forcing them to abandon the current journal system.
We hope this lets authors who want to see the publishing system evolve to have their cake and eat it too - to get the journal citations upon which careers still depend, while also helping build a system that will no longer require such citations.
OK. Enough for now. Please leave your comments, questions and concerns, and I'll get to them as I can.
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