Infrastructure for an open platform-publishing ecosystem

In recent years, eLife has embraced the rise of preprints in the biomedical sciences and adapted its processes to make the review of preprints its central goal.

We have developed Sciety, which allows researchers to discover refereed preprints from across the web, to highlight the value of preprint review as an alternative to traditional journal publishing.

We aim to create a new publishing model where research is published as a preprint, then reviewed and curated by participating groups. This proposal outlines the steps required to build out an end-to-end workflow to support this model. Over three years we will develop Sciety to support author submission, peer review management and community curation.

Over the first year we will work with a ‘model customer’ to develop the full workflow, then spend two years enhancing and adapting the model for a diverse range of partners, including publishers and funders.

We will work with existing preprint servers such as bioRxiv, open source providers such as Coko Foundation, and journal providers such as PubPub, thereby fitting into the existing ecosystem rather than building a new one.

This approach, combined with our existing work to build the community, will ensure the long-term success of the platform.