KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The journal eLife has abolished accept/reject decisions and established a new model for research dissemination.
• All papers assessed by the journal will now be published as reviewed preprints, featuring open peer reviews and a further, standardised assessment.

Following eLife’s 2021 policy to make preprinting a mandatory requirement ahead of submission, the journal has recently stopped accepting or rejecting papers after peer review. Instead, eLife will publish ‘reviewed preprints’, which they hope will bring together the diligence of peer review and the fast pace of preprint posting.

The reviewed preprint format will see all papers that are accepted for review posted online. They will appear alongside open peer reviews and an eLife assessment, which summarises editor and peer reviewer opinions on the paper’s impact and strength of evidence. These assessments are tailored to non-experts and use standardised language, akin to a grading scale. Authors also have the opportunity to include a response to the reviewer comments and assessment. After posting, authors can choose to take no further action, submit a revised version of the paper, or deem the article the final version of record to be indexed on PubMed.

eLife have shared various benefits that they believe this approach will offer:

• increased transparency around author–reviewer communication
• improved communication of intricate reviewer thought processes
• greater accessibility for non-expert readers
• greater autonomy for authors
• increased emphasis on paper content, as opposed to publisher title
• faster mobilisation of scientific content.

Editor-in-Chief Michael Eisen has described the major shift in approach as “relinquishing the traditional journal role of gatekeeper” in favour of a system tailored to scientists rather than publishers.

eLife editors expressed their hopes that this transparent review model will encourage readers to judge a paper by its content as opposed to the journal it is published in.

In a recent editorial, eLife editors expressed their hopes that this transparent review model will encourage readers to judge a paper by its content as opposed to the journal it is published in, and that it will “become the norm across science”.

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