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And if we were to publish in Open Research Europe and eLife, with -dare I say it- open peer review?

CeRIS - Institut Pasteur

[Version anglaise de l’article « Et si nous choisissions de publier avec Open Research Europe et eLife ? »]

Perhaps you have heard the news; the publishing platform Open Research Europe (ORE) have officially announced their expansion. Until now, publishing with ORE was free, but only open to researchers who were financed by an official European project. Thanks to new financial support from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, researchers from these countries will also be able to submit their articles beginning this autumn.

In case you are unfamiliar, ORE use the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) model: following initial verification from the editors that a submission meets the platform’s guidelines and ethics principles, the preprint is shared publicly, and the open peer review follows. But- does ORE’s publishing model truly interest young researchers?

The early-career researchers with whom I spoke had mixed feelings: on one hand, the proposition of a diamond open-access publication is appealing, all the more so as direct diffusion of the preprint enables the work’s immediate recognition for authors’ careers.  Yet those same careers still depend heavily on journal impact factors. Under a PRC publishing model, ORE will never have an impact factor.

The same is true for the comparative gold open-access PRC journal, eLife, whose impact factor was revoked following their adoption of the PRC model – a fate normally reserved only for journals found guilty of professional misconduct. Such a PRC model, then, can it last?

A recent report from eLife summarizes their experience. The editors recognize that they underestimated the challenge of forcing the publishing system to evolve; eLife suffered a 55% reduction in submissions in 2024 following the loss of their impact factor, predominantly from countries in which impact factors are the primary base for evaluating research and researchers. (In France, submissions dropped by 23%). That said, the proportion of articles which were accepted by eLife for peer review between 2024 and 2025 increased from 27 to 35%. eLife therefore consider that they have preferentially lost the most problematic submissions, and that overall submission quality has increased.

But eLife are not stopping there. In the coming years, eLife plans to further improve and evolve their PRC model. Notably, they announced a new partnership with q.e.d. to improve the interpretation of public peer reviews (will eLife start including q.e.d. AI peer reviews as the third reviewer?). Furthermore, eLife plan to further content development, for example, through a new option to directly integrate explanatory videos for figures within articles, or through the creation of new article types, such as “Replication Studies” dedicated to replicating others’ findings. In complement to these innovations at the journal level, eLife have received £2.4 million from the Wellcome Trust as part of the “eLife Pathways” initiative to create new open-access publishing tools. The ultimate goal (and it is admirable) is to support the development of a global industry of like-minded open-access journals, ensuring their high-quality, visibility, and indexing.

Let’s imagine then that these models from eLife and ORE stay the course. As early-career researchers, we also ask ourselves about the models’ mandatory open peer review. If the permanently public reports are very negative, could it damage our articles (and our careers)?

A recent preprint investigated this question by analysing 116 359 articles from PLOS journals, which offer their authors the option to publish peer reviews alongside their articles once accepted. Since the implementation of this practice in 2019, 40% of authors have chosen open peer review, the majority within the publication PLOS One. The study shows that articles with public peer reviews are more cited (about 1.07 times more, to be exact- a small but statistically significant difference) and less retracted (about 43% less over 6 years). Surprisingly, there was no association between the length of the peer review process and the choice of open peer review. We might have expected that a longer peer review period, implying more requests for significant modifications, additional data, experiments, or analyses, would be accompanied by harsher reviews authors would prefer not to share. Instead, perhaps the decision to share peer reviews is motivated by how well authors consider they have replied to reviewers’ critiques rather than by content of the critiques themselves.

Putting everything together, where does this leave us?

It is no secret: I wish we were evaluated by the quality and reproducibility of our work, rather than by the reputation of journals in which we publish. Alas, as long as the evaluation system fails to evolve, publishing on a platform such as ORE or with a journal like eLife is a gamble for all those who are still building their careers. With regard to open peer review, however, I think we can be safely reassured, our articles won’t be less cited for it! And in the end, rather than fearing open peer review, perhaps we should see it as a valuable opportunity to demonstrate the strength and rigour of our work, all throughout the scientific process.

Caitlin Martin, postdoctoral researcher at the Institut Pasteur

 

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