eLife’s new publishing policy

October 21, 2022 at 10:25 am | | literature, science community, scientific integrity

Let me preface this post with the admission that I’m likely wrong about my concerns about eLife’s new model. I was actually opposed to preprints when I first heard about them in 2006!

The Journal eLife and Mike Eisen announced it’s new model for publishing papers:

  • Authors post preprint.
  • Authors submit preprint to eLife.
  • eLife editorial board decides whether to reject the manuscript or send out for review.
  • After reviews, the paper will be published no matter what the reviews say. The reviews and an eLife Assessment will be published alongside the paper. At this point, the paper has a DOI and is citable.
  • Authors then have a choice of whether to revise their manuscript or just publish as-is.
  • When the authors decide the paper is finalized, that will become the “Version of Record” and the paper will be indexed on Pubmed.

Very interesting and bold move. The goal is to make eLife and its peer review not a gatekeeper of truth, but instead a system of evaluating and summarizing papers. Mike Eisen hopes that readers will see “eLife” and no longer think “that’s probably good science” and instead think “oh, I should read the reviews to see if that’s a good paper.”

Potential problems

But here are my primary concerns

  1. This puts even more power in the hands of the editors to effectively accept/reject papers. And this process is currently opaque, bias-laden, and authors have no recourse when editors make bad decisions.
  2. The idea that the eLife label will no longer have prestige is naive. The journal has built a strong reputation as a great alternative to the glam journal (Science, Nature, Cell) and that’s not going away. For example, people brag when their papers are reviewed in F1000, and I think the same will apply to eLife Assessments: readers will automatically assume that a paper published in eLife is high-impact, regardless of what the Assessment says.
  3. The value that eLife is adding to the process is diminishing, and the price tag is steep ($2000).
  4. The primary problem I have with peer review is that it is simultaneously overly burdensome and not sufficiently rigorous. This model doesn’t substantially reduce the burden on authors to jump through hoops held by the reviewers (or risk a bad eLife Assessment). It also is less rigorous by lowering the bar to “publication.”

Solutions

Concern #1: I think it’s a step in the wrong direction to grant editors even more power. Over the years, editors haven’t exactly proven themselves to be ideal gatekeepers. How can we ensure that the editors will act fairly and don’t get attracted by shiny objects? That said, this policy might actually put more of a spotlight on the desk-rejection step and yield change. eLife could address this concern in various ways:

  • The selection process could be a lottery (granted, this isn’t ideal because finding editors and reviewers for a crappy preprint will be hard).
  • Editors could be required to apply a checklist or algorithmic selection process.
  • The editorial process could be made transparent by publishing the desk rejection/acceptace along with the reasons.

Concern #2 might resolve itself with time. Dunno. Hard to predict how sentiment will change. But I do worry that eLife is trying to change the entire system, while failing to modify any of the perverse incentives that drive the problems in the first place. But maybe it’s better to try something than to do nothing.

Concern #3 is real, but I’m sure that Mike Eisen would love it if a bunch of other journals adopted this model as well and introduced competition. And honestly, collating and publishing all the reviews and writing a summary assessment of the paper is more than what most journals do now.

Journals should be better gatekeepers

But #4 is pretty serious. The peer review process has always had to balance being sufficiently rigorous to avoid publishing junk science with the need to disseminate new information on a reasonable timescale. Now that preprinting is widely accepted and distributing results immediately is super easy, I am less concerned with latter. I believe that the new role of journals should be as more exacting gatekeepers. But it feels like eLife’s policy was crafted exclusively by editors and authors to give themselves more control, reduce the burden for authors, and shirk the responsibility of producing and vetting good science.

There are simply too many low-quality papers. The general public, naive to the vagaries of scientific publishing, often take “peer-reviewed” papers as being true, which is partially why we have a booming supplement industry. Most published research findings are false. Most papers cannot be replicated. Far too many papers rely on pseudoreplication to get low p-values or fail to show multiple biological replicates. And when was the last time you read a paper where the authors blinded their data acquisition or analysis?

For these reasons, I think that the role of a journal in the age of preprints is to better weed out low-quality science. At minimum, editors and peer reviewers should ensure that authors followed the 3Rs (randomize, reduce bias, repeat) before publishing. And there should be a rigorous checklist to ensure that the basics of the scientific process were followed.

Personally, I think the greatest “value-add” that journals could offer would be to arrange a convincing replication of the findings before publishing (peer replication), then just do away with the annoying peer review dog-and-pony show altogether.

Conclusion

We’ll have to wait and see how this new model plays out, and how eLife corrects stumbling blocks along the way. I have hope that, with good editorial team and good practices/rules around the selection process, eLife might be able to pull this off. Not sure if it’s a model that will scale to other, less trustworthy journals.

But just because this isn’t my personal favorite solution to the problem of scientific publishing, that doesn’t mean that eLife’s efforts won’t help make a better world. I changed my mind about the value of preprints, and I’ll be happy to change my mind about eLife’s new publishing model if it turns out to be a net good!

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