Infrastructure for an open platform-publishing ecosystem

eLife is building a new publishing system where scientific papers are posted as preprints first, then reviewed and curated by independent groups, rather than going through traditional journal peer review. This matters because the current journal-based system is slow, expensive, and often gates access behind paywalls. Preprints—papers posted publicly before peer review—are already widespread in biomedical science, but there is no standard way to organise, review, or signal quality across them. Without that infrastructure, researchers and funders cannot easily distinguish rigorous preprints from unreliable ones, limiting how useful preprints can be as a primary publication route. If successful, this project will create an end-to-end workflow that lets authors submit a preprint, have it reviewed by participating groups, and have the reviewed version curated and discoverable through Sciety—a platform eLife already runs. Over three years, the team will first develop the full workflow with one “model customer,” then adapt it for multiple publishers and funders. By integrating with existing preprint servers like bioRxiv and open-source tools, the system slots into the current ecosystem rather than replacing it. The result could shift how biomedical research is communicated: faster, more transparent, and less dependent on traditional journals.