I guess I'd just note that we already have machines (search engines) that read papers and tell us whether we should read them too, and much of the time we only read bits of those papers when we do. One could imagine that evolving but one would hope human eyes/brains remain at the end.
that seems the key point. though one counter-argument is of course that all the reading will be by machines anyway...
I've been reading fantasies of "forget arricles let's just have lab books online" for as long as I've been in a lab...
yep - some version of that proposal every year for >2 decades. Clearly some cases (reviews, certain large projects) where living articles/public notebooks/data streams might make sense, but the vast majority of scientists I talk to believe it's inappropriate for the vast majority of science
And one difficulty has been what the basis for editorial rejection actually is. IIRC Mike said they reviewed papers where they felt they could add value, other editors said they reviewed papers if in scope, and this article says editors "screen for serious flaws". Rather different triage criteria.
yep - that occurred to me to. though of course it is a claim made in the article rather than by the journal itself.
That design later changed when they dropped accept/reject decisions. The tension between the former and latter aspirations - and between proponents of those two differing view - is the real challenge for them 2/2
This account of the eLife saga will provoke much debate. One aspect isn't accurate: eLife wasn't "designed as an experiment in removing gatekeepers". The original intent was to publish "outstanding papers" but have the gatekeepers be academic not professional editors 1/2 nikomc.com/2026/03/05/e...
Many models for the future of publishing assume people/someone will be willing to pay for curation and/or will be tolerated/function in a world where some don’t have access to to this. We’ll see
Plan U is what makes sense.
Individuals won’t, nor probably will funders, so institutional libraries are the inevitable hope.
F1000 Prime (later Faculty Opinions and now apparently something else) was one effort, and people whiined it wasn’t free… 2/2
Creating “society-verified signals” and curated layers of expert conversation is appealing.
The question is whether anyone is willing to pay…. 1/2
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/03/10/g...
"Funders serious about timely, open, and equitable access to research must explicitly recognize preprint sharing as a route to Open Access compliance"
I know I'm a broken record on this but it seems so blindingly obvious... #PlanU journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
council.science/blog/open-sc...
MIT graduate student council "calls for adoption of preprints...to
accelerate communication of scientific discoveries, and restore healthy incentives" drive.google.com/file/d/1KLbj...
well this is why there are ethics declarations, and that COi is clearly indicated in the article.
"AI is here to stay...From writing to reviewing...It is essential to engage with it [&] develop use cases that benefit the community...The clear winning option is use of AI review by authors prior to submission.” link.springer.com/article/10.1... via @tlemberger.bsky.social @odedrechavi.bsky.social
That makes sense
(that’s not a criticism of either - and in fact some lament any form of impact assessment. )
Right but that elife distinction is not a separate process involving different people; it’s an editorial summary. Meanwhile PLOSone does not do the second part (IIRC the hope was that would emerge but it never really did)
What is the PLOS approach you refer to?
I'm not sure eLife formally separate this. There are reviews and the editorial statement, but they're not quite the same as the Q/I distinction SolvingFor makes and not done by distinct groups of people. The Q/I separation maps to (P)RC and feels like it's the clearest example of distinguishing R+C
"AI simulations of humans...a fresh way to study human behaviour".
Will these be as good as mouse cancer models? 😉 [Ducks]
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
We’ll see more of this in everything from alternative medicine to support for conspiracy theories.
Beware “pseudo-triangulation, appearance of convergence from unconvincing lines of evidence…literature characterized by quasi-replication, where any difference is taken as adding to the evidence, even when contradictory…a false impression there is a robust phenomenon” www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
I can't speak to individual papers. but emailed appeals are considered and that is the best way to go if you feel a judgment was in error. The FAQ is always handy too www.biorxiv.org/about/FAQ
yes - there is certainly an uptick in fairly simple analyses. we've always had a policy excluding simple analyses (BLAST search etc) but what counts as simple is tricky to define and LLMs make a lot of things more simple to do... Others are seeing this too www.science.org/content/arti...
yep - and imagine if there were dozens!
Reminder: bioRxiv's "no reviews/hypotheses" policy is something we had from the outset, because it would require subjective judgments akin to peer review (and rapid dissemination seemed less critical for this type of article). The ease of generating these with LLMs make me glad we have it. 2/n
