New Collaboration To Deliver Open-Source Submission And Peer-Review Platform

This week, eLife and Collaborative Knowledge Foundation announced a partnership “to build a user-driven, open-source submission and peer-review platform” aimed at improving on existing industry models.

Working together, the two organisations “hope to accelerate progress in delivering a modern, fast and user-driven system,” they said in a press release. “The project will be designed to help streamline communications between authors, editors and reviewers at all stages of the submission and review process.”

“The tasks of submitting and reviewing a manuscript should not be difficult, and any time spent on the administration of these processes could be better spent on ensuring the quality of the research itself,” Giuliano Maciocci, eLife’s head of product, said in the release. “As such, the design of the system will ensure that all stakeholders are required to interact with it only when their input will have the most impact.”

“Much of the technical infrastructure available to publishers today suffers from technical debt accrued over the course of the industry’s transition from print to digital, Maciocci told Intellectual Property Watch via email. “In some cases, the user experience these existing systems present to their users has also been a secondary consideration in their design, resulting in less than ideal interfaces and workflows which require more time than strictly necessary for the completion of everyday author, editor and reviewer tasks.”

“To enable the academic publishing industry to accelerate its rate of innovation, make efficiency gains in the most common publisher workflows, and ultimately reduce costs, we are aiming to move away from the monolithic software models of the leading solutions in use today and develop a more modular, modern solution designed with the user at its centre,” he said.

According to the release: “The new system will be developed to the latest standards of performance and efficiency, with an open modular architecture that others will be able to adapt to their own needs. This approach, similar to that taken with eLife’s own publishing and hosting platform, Continuum, means that modules can be composed in different ways and reused across publishers more easily, and will allow eLife and others to continue building new features depending on user needs.”

“The system will also be an ongoing effort,” it added, “developed in the open to allow the community to track, participate and share in the project.”