eLife ending old publishing model

Minh-Hoang Nguyen
AISDL
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7520-3844

November 4, 2022

Science has long adopted a peer review system, in which a journal’s acceptance or rejection is usually viewed as a determination of a scientific study’s quality. For scholars, rejections can lead to emotional difficulty and lower creativity, productivity, and professional satisfaction [1]. In contrast, journals are usually proud of their high rejection rate, as it represents their rigor and prestige [2].

While a majority of journals aim for a higher rejection rate, eLife’s decision to cease the acceptance-rejection mechanism for manuscript publication has caught the great attention of many publishers and scholars. eLife is a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal for the biomedical and life sciences, which was co-founded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust in 2012.

On October 20, 2022, eLife announced its new publishing model, which eliminates the acceptance-rejection decisions after peer review and focuses on public reviews and evaluations of preprints instead. The new model “combines the immediacy and openness of preprints with the scrutiny of peer review by experts” [3]. Specifically, after submitting the manuscript, the paper will be determined whether to be invited for peer review. If it is, the manuscript will receive assessments on the significance of the findings, the strength of the evidence reported in the preprint, and recommendations on improving the paper from eLife, public reviews, and confidential reviewers. What makes eLife’s new model special is that the authors can “control which revisions to make, and if and when to resubmit” [3].


Figure: eLife’s new publication process, by eLife [3] (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The current editor-in-chief of eLife – biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley, says the new peer review model of the journal is “more nuanced, more informative, and more useful to the community than our thumbs-up or thumbs-down publishing decision.” Moreover, he also argues that the model will help speed up the peer review process, which is often opaque and slow in other journals [4].

However, not all scholars think that the change of eLife is a good move. Paul Bienasz – a virologist at Rockefeller University, doubts the “inadequate” quality of papers published by a publication decision model that favors “an offer to publish every manuscript that can get past a cursory editorial screen.” He also criticizes the journal as akin to a “bait and switch” for authors supporting the journal’s growth, including himself [5].

Suppose we view the publishing process as a filtering process of scientific progress [6]. Rejection-acceptance model represents a filtering process driven by editors and reviewers, who are trained and experienced. This can lead to more “qualified” and selective publications. However, the binary acceptance-rejection approach is sometimes too extreme. Combined with the indispensable subjective biases of the evaluators (based on their bounded knowledge and worldview), it may cause ideological homogeneity [7].

Meanwhile, the new model of eLife focuses more on the roles of reviews and leaves the assessment of the manuscript’s scientific importance to readers. This approach requires readers to play a more active role in assessing the quality and value of the manuscript. Nevertheless, the new model can help avoid the evaluators’ biases and contribute to inclusion and diversity promotion, which is the source of creativity and resilience [8,9].



The new publishing model of eLife is, indeed, debatable, with pros and cons. Although we cannot be certain about the new model’s future as it needs time to be tested [9], groundbreaking initiatives, like eLife’s, are necessary for the scientific-publishing-industrial complex to experiment and self-correct its deficiencies.

References

[1] Day NE. (2011). The silent majority: Manuscript rejection and its impact on scholars. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(4), 704-718.

[2] Frontiers Science News. (2015). Selecting for impact: new data debunks old beliefs. Frontiers Science News.

[3] eLife. (2022). eLife’s New Model: Changing the way you share your research. eLife.

[4] Brainard J. (2022). Journal declares an end to accepting or rejecting papers. Science, 378(6618), 346.

[5] Bieniasz P. (2022). Destroying eLife’s reputation for selectivity does not serve science. Times Higher Education.

[6] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH, La VP. (2022). The mindsponge and BMF analytics for innovative thinking in social sciences and humanities. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.

[7] Vuong QH, et al. (2021). Assessing the ideological homogeneity in entrepreneurial finance research by highly cited publications. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8, 110.

[8] Reinmoeller P, van Baardwijk N. (2005). The link between diversity and resilience. MIT Sloan Management Review.

[9] Vuong QH. (2022). The Kingfisher Story Collection. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BG2NNHY6.