Month: December 2020

eLife will adopt another approach to peer review starting in July, 2021. Peer Review: Implementing a “publish, then review” model of publishing announces this change and the rationale for it. After an internal analysis that showed that nearly 70% of papers under review at eLife were already available on bioRxiv, medRxiv or arXiv, the publisher determined to refocus its role from determining what should be published to providing a public assessment of the work prepared by their reviewers and editors. As it shifts to becoming exclusively a reviewer of preprints, eLife will work to mitigate the concerns some researchers have about publishing in preprint form and having reviews published publicly, as well as their reliance on journal citations as a metric of impact. These changes are discussed further in posts in Science and Nature.