 Hi, I'm Tim Behrens. I'm the Deputy Editor at E-Life. Welcome. We just wanted to run a seminar which is telling you about some of the cool new things we're doing at E-Life generally and allow you to ask some questions of our neuroscience editors. So yeah, E-Life is trying to change how publishing works and so we realize this is a bit of a big step and a confusing step for you, for our authors and so yeah, this is just kind of an introduction to that. And so we're lucky today to have some of our editors with us. Should we advance to the next? Oh, yeah, maybe Maria, you can go through this slide about the participation and how it all, or I can just read it. I can do that quickly for you, Tim. So in terms of a few participation guidelines, you can post your questions in the Zoom chat to the panelists. We will have a dedicated time at the end of the presentation for Q&A and at that point we'll invite you to speak if you'd like or we can read out the questions for you. We want everyone to enjoy this meeting so to ensure that all have a chance to contribute, all participants are asked to abide by E-Life's code of conduct. So just some examples of behavior that we think positively to our communities include showing empathy and kindness towards others, being respectful of different opinions, viewpoints and experiences and some examples of unacceptable behavior that will not be tolerated today would be, for example, making it difficult for others to speak or participate, for example, through repeated interruptions or disruptions. So in the background, we also have my colleague Ania Starris from the E-Life staff. So if you need any technical support, please send a direct message to Ania. And for your reference, this webinar is being recorded. Great. Thanks, Maria. Perfect. And so today we're lucky to have with us, obviously you're not lucky to have me, but you're lucky to have Flores and Juan and Megan. This is timed for the European and Asian markets. And so we've got a good selection of our European and Asian neuroscience editors. We've actually just had a big recruitment drive in Asian neuroscience editors because we realized that we are quite European and American biased. And so we hope there'll be a big, there'll be a much larger Asian community amongst our editors. And so we've had people accept recently from China, from Japan, from Singapore, amongst many, amongst others, a big drive. So hopefully that'll make it easier to interact with us from Asia. So that's great. So Flores is a cognitive neuroscientist, as is Juan. And Megan, I don't know, I guess you want to call yourself a systems neuroscientist interested in cerebellum. Fantastic. Let's move on to the next slide, please. So Tim, I wonder if you would like to also just invite Megan Flores and who wants to say a little bit more about themselves. So Megan, would you like to also just say what your role at ELIFE is and provide a brief summary of your research path, current scope of research and the kinds of people you usually handle for ELIFE, please. Sure. Hi, I'm Megan Cary. I'm a group leader in the Champelamo Neuroscience Program at the Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. I'm a reviewing editor at ELIFE and my background is in the neural control of movement as well as cellular physiology in the cerebellum and in my lab we're interested in neural control of movement, specifically looking at learned and coordinated movements in mice and we focus on cerebellar circuits. So the kinds of papers I handle at ELIFE are I handle a lot of cerebellum papers, papers on motor control as well as behavioral analysis and computational ethology. That's something my lab has been very active in. And I also handle some neural circuits papers for mouse neural circuit work more broadly, so outside of the cerebellum, basal ganglia and other circuits. Yeah, I'm a big fan of ELIFE and I've published a lot there myself, so looking forward to answering your questions. Is that good, Maria? Enough. It's perfect. Thanks, Megan. Glenn, would you like to go next? Okay, so hi everyone. My name is Juan Luo and I'm currently associate professor in School of Technological and Cognitive Sciences at Taekin University, Beijing, China. I'm a reviewing editor for ELIFE and I have done this job for more than two years. So my background is actually, I got my PhD from University of Maryland under the supervision of Professor David Papo and Johnson Simon. So at that time, my research interest is using EEG and MEG to try to understand the time-based, optimization-based neural mechanism for speech processing, for auditory processing. And then when I came back to China, I first worked at Chinese Academy of Sciences. Now I'm at Taekin University. My research interest began to widen, why to some extent, especially to vision domain. So we use time-result approaches, the EEG and MEG and also some behavior measurements combined with computational modeling, trying to understand the temporal dynamics, temporal organization in many cognitive processes, such as visual attention and working memory. Yeah, that's my current research interest. The paper I'll handle in ELIFE, to my memory, I think it's wide range. So it covers auditory processing, speech processing, multi-sensory integration, attention, and working memory. Sometimes I also handle some MEG technique paper, although I'm not an expert, but yeah, I'm interested to know more advanced ways to either MEG source modeling or data analysis. Yeah, I'm also a big fan of ELIFE, and yeah, we can share more in the later session. Thank you. Thank you, Juan. And Floris? Hi, my name is Floris Delano, and I'm full professor at Rambard University, Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and principal investigator at the Donners Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior. I'm a senior editor at ELIFE in the neuroscience section, and my main focus of research is the cognitive neuroscience of perception and decision-making. So I'm interested in how top-down states like prior beliefs and goals interact with incoming sensory information. And in my lab, we use non-invasive neuroimaging methods in humans, like fMRI and MEG, as well as behavior and computational modeling to answer questions in that field. And at ELIFE, I handle mostly papers studying humans, but also some looking at neural activity in other species, such as rodent primates. And the papers that I see are mostly experimental papers. They use an experimental manipulation, and they aim at better understanding the neurobiology of certain types of cognition of behavior. So they usually try to make a link between brain and behavior. Okay, now I'm looking forward to answering all your questions later. Thanks. Great. Thanks very much indeed. That gave me some respite, as well as introducing our fabulous editors. So maybe we can move to the next slide now, Maria. So for the next 10 or 15, 10 minutes or so, I'm going to just try and tell you something new we're doing at ELIFE and hope to get you excited by it. But first, I'm just going to say ELIFE in general, it's raison d'etre. The reason we're here is partly to publish fantastic science, where all the decisions made by fantastic scientists, but also to provide big changes, new mechanisms for how science publishing can work, because we all know of all the problems and profiteering by the science publishing industry. And I'm not going to go into all those details of the problems, but just to highlight a few things we've done in the past, and a few problems that still obviously remain that we're trying to address now. And so previously, for example, we've been big advocates of increasing the transparency of peer review, publishing all the reviews of our accepted papers. We've introduced new mechanisms for review, which mean that individual reviewers have less power. And because the reviews are consultative, the reviewers talk amongst each other and amongst the editors to make the quality of decision making better. And this is very popular amongst our authors. It leads to quick and clear decisions where the review team are unanimous. We've also been big innovators in the sort of mechanisms of publishing and science. And so for example, we've invested in executable research articles, which are amazing things where the code for an article is embedded in the article, so you can do things like change all the statistics and see if the results hold, et cetera, embedded in the article. And we've been a massive advocate of open publishing and so open data, open access. So those are the kinds of issues that we've focused on before. But that leaves the bones of science publishing still as it were. The basing mechanism for how science publishing works hasn't been changed by E-Life yet. Journals are still gatekeepers. Enormous effort is wasted on this gatekeeping, meaning the authors have to submit to many different journals before they get in, which leads to years of wasted effort. This means that reviewers and editors have too much power. And it also means that when you use your papers to get grants and jobs, really what they look at is still the journal's name, however many times they sign things saying that they won't look at the general name. That's really what they look at because there's no other form of public evaluation. And so if we want to really get to the bottom of these inherent problems in the publishing world, we need something really radically different. Okay, cool. And so E-Life is trying to imagine new ways of doing that. And here is what we're doing right now. And so if you, Maria, move to the next slide, we've got this extraordinary opportunity to do something right now because of what's happening in the rest of publishing outside of the journal architect, outside of journals. This is what's happened to Baro Archive over the past five or six years. Like it's now publishing 4,000 articles a month, but Baro Archive is like flooding. The journal world is a smaller and smaller part of the published literature and the unreviewed archive is a larger and larger part of it. And there's two ways that you can think about this. You can think about this as being a threat to journals, or you can think about it as being an opportunity, an exciting thing for journals to handle. We have a whole new world of how science is shared. And the question is not okay, how does it fit with the journals we've got already? The question is, how do we take the opportunity of this whole new world to make a new way of evaluating science? Well, that's as far as we see the question to be. And so if you move on to the next slide, Maria, the way we see it, pretty much that means journals aren't publishers anymore. Papers are already published on Baro Archive. The problem of publishing a paper is being solved by somebody who's not a journal anymore. And so what is the journal's job? The journal's job is to now to curate that vast literature to make sure the high quality science is most visible, the interesting science is most visible. So what we're doing is we're trying to figure out how to curate what this new world of publishing is going to look like. So we want to work out how to optimize peer review. And we think this means creating a new type of manuscript, a preprint with evaluations attached to it that's published in a preprint server or in whatever new mechanism you're thinking about, but which combines the peer reviews, the evaluations of the community alongside the manuscript, and then allows mechanisms for interesting papers to be highlighted clearly and attract the attention in a way that journals do now. Which means that we need to develop a new infrastructure for doing this, and more importantly, a new culture for how this discourse around preprints is going to happen. And so many of the things that we're doing are about these two things, this infrastructure, the pragmatics of how you write public reviews and how you put them with papers, and then also how we can do it responsibly and respectfully in a way that is useful to the key stakeholders, to the granting agencies, to the newspapers, but also to the science community. Okay, thanks, Maria. Can we go on to the next one? So this is the kind of thing we're doing. I'm going to read you a few of these evaluation summaries, but we're viewing our primary output now of the journal as evaluations of preprints. We're trying to redirect our editorial skills to doing this really, really well. And so we're writing things like this on this paper. This is something like this is a great paper, but it needs some more statistical analyses to really prove its point, that kind of thing in the evaluation summary, so people know what we think roughly of the journal, of the paper, and then more detailed reviews are being attached to those. But those aren't the kind of reviews that you get, that you get sent back with all the nitty, bitty details that you get sent back from most journals. Those are going to be, we try to make those reviews that highlight the key strengths and key weaknesses of the paper, reviews that are useful for community reading the reviews, not written just for the authors. And so this is trying to make this new thing, this evaluated preprint. Thanks, Maria. Yep, so this is more on what I've just been saying, effectively saying we are going to be only, we're turning the power of our editorial process towards evaluating preprints. This means that we're basically going to only evaluate preprints. All papers we review will be preprinted before, actually very soon by July this year. And we are going to be trying to make, we're going to be trying to make a new way of curating these preprints. Cool. Thanks, Maria. So of course we love all the things that we were doing before, so we're going to try to make sure all of the, we're going to try to make sure all of the benefits from the previous processes are still there. So we're going to have, keep our consultation amongst the reviewers, keep these, the limited revision requests and round of revision. But we're going to be adding to this, we're going to be adding to this new system where we're making, we're separating out what we publish, the parts of the review that we make public, which are written for the reader versus the parts that are about getting published in eLife. And I'll just tell you in a little bit in more detail in a couple of slides that we're still, there we're still going to be making eLife decisions and publishing things in eLife as well as the, as the online evaluations. But the decision part that's going to be about how do you get into eLife is separated from this public evaluation of the preprint. And again, next slide, Maria. So I think that, yep, so I think that's roughly what I've been saying. Yep, so you're going to end up with an evaluated preprint with an evaluation summary, I'll give you a couple more examples of the evaluation summary in a second. And critically, if you don't end up being accepted into eLife the Journal, then you get control of when those reviews are posted. Now, which is important, because whilst we're transitioning to the system and we're still making publication decisions, we think it's important that our reviews don't punish you or stop you from publishing your paper elsewhere. And so we're trying to be really careful. Again, a couple more things, sentences about that later. Next slide, Maria. Okay, so I just wanted to give you a couple of ideas about where the kinds of things that might be written about your papers online, which just to give you an idea of what you might be able to put in your CV or put in your grant application instead of a journal name in the future. And obviously, this kind of thing requires the granting agencies to be on board, but we're doing that kind of lobbying as well to try to make sure that's true. But this is one example, this study is of broad interest across a diverse range of neuroscientists studying sensory systems who walk out of behavior and interregional interactions. It's a unique dramatic and important demonstration of the specific interactions, blah, blah, blah, very clear statement about what the contribution is rather than the journal name over here. This study is a tour de force that makes a major contribution to the field. It provides a massive amount of information about the connectivity in the Drosophila. So those kinds of evaluations, we hope will be succinct enough to go in your, the reviewers will really read them, unlike the papers reviews of your grant applications don't read your papers, but contain enough information or more information about what we think about a paper than just a journal name. And it's a big push to try to, to change this attitude that you have to have an nature paper or you have to have a science paper to get a, to get into, to get funding. Okay. And last slide. This can be the last slide. So we think this is, this is, I just repeat, we think why this is important because the authors control when your work is shared, the evaluation is divorced from the publication of science. And therefore, we can make richer, more transparent evaluations. And so the, this means the peer reviews are really written, not to increase the impact factor of the journal, because they're not gatekeeping anymore. The peer reviews are written to help the authors and the readers and the, and the other stakeholders, the granting agencies, the journalists, et cetera, et cetera, understand what the contribution of the paper is. And we, I hope that means that peer review can be more constructive and more respectful. Great. Thanks. I think you've probably heard, you've understand it now. So in the last slide, I just wanted to, I was worried, I just wanted to make sure, just to move one more slide down, Rhea. I just wanted to make sure that everybody understands that we are currently, we realize that right now, none of the key stakeholders that understand what a reviewed preprint, a refereed preprint is. And so right now we're still going to be making decisions about that, let you get into the journal. We're still publishing things in eLife right now. This, we're, this is the future we're envisaging. And so the moment we're running two different schemes, we're going to do everything I just told you about, give you your rich set of public reviews that you can use to get your new job. And we're also going to give you a published paper, just like a life mark one. Cool. Excellent. Thanks very much indeed. Maria, I think that that's all I have to say. Is that right? Yeah. Thanks. I wonder if we should just invite Megan, Juan and Flores to say a little bit more about what appeals to them, that these new model as well, if they could share their experiences, editors and views and authors as well. Megan, would you like to start? And then we'll open up the Q&A after the editors have spoken. Sure. I'll just say really one thing, which is that I think one of the things I like about eLife compared to other journals is has always been the kind of level of humanity that's embedded within the review process. So I think that the already the consultative nature of peer review was a big step in that direction. So people are, you know, having real conversations with real life people, which I think encourages good behavior in terms of honest and constructive reviewing and discussion. And I think that is in my experience handling papers since this public review system has started. I think this actually provides an extra boost to that kind of constructive nature of the reviews. And the reason for that is when people submit their reviews, not only do they know that their name is going to be associated, they're going to be discussing and sort of defending their reviews with these other colleagues that they're reviewing with, but they know that these reviews are going to go on to or some part of it is going to go on to borrow by archive, regardless of whether eLife ends up publishing a paper. So even for the most negative reviews, I think that there is a tendency to be a little bit more constructive. And I've even in at least one paper that I've handled, people have actually backed off on some of their hardship criticisms and said, you know, I don't really feel comfortable putting that out there. And therefore I'm going to kind of take it back. And so I think it's everything that eLife has done to improve the constructive and positive nature of the reviewing. I think this is this is one extra push in that direction. So that's my favorite aspect of it so far. Thanks, Juan. Yes, I completely agree with what Megan just said. I mean, at the beginning, when I know eLife, I was so intrigued by the way they put the reviews public. It seems like open the black box for them. So at that time, I learned a lot from reading the reviews and know how reviews think other papers and the whole process. And also, since I have been the review editor, I really enjoy the consultation sessions because in the consultation session, it's not just you decide it, it's like you can hear a lot of different voices. And because it's public, I mean, public among this review editors, you should be responsible for what you have said. As to the new publication policy, first of all, I mean, my lab will always put out paper in preprints. So it's not very different, at least for my lab. But I know like everybody might have their own different concerns. But the new policy also make the review think that they're all comments, no matter its revision accepted or rejected were put online. So everybody should be responsible for what they say. This is a good way for us to communicate. I think since the new publication policy, I have handled I think 45 papers. I remember one paper we also need to consult with a review that maybe the tone should change a little bit, like this thing. So yeah, I think we should learn although a little bit slower. But that's how we communicate with each other and be respectful for others. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for one, Floris. Yeah, I can mostly just echo what Megan and Juan already said, I completely agree with what they are saying. For me, E-Life is also, I think there's several aspects of E-Life that I find very appealing. I think one of them is that it's run by scientists and there is a lot of emphasis on communication, so on like reaching consensus. And the idea there is that it will make the decision making process more rigorous, but hopefully also less biased. For example, as biased towards topics that are trendy or labs that are famous. So in that sense, I really like that aspect of it. Also, when a paper is reviewed, there's a dialogue between the reviewers and the editor. And rather than just the editor making a decision based on two lists or three lists of reviews. And I think the innovative spirit of E-Life, so the drive to change how the publishing industry works, is really cool. And there, I also think the PRC model, so what Tim was just describing, is really interesting. What I like about that is that at the moment, there's a lot of thought that goes into the review process. And then it often just remains hidden from the scientific community forever, because it's a lot of people that think about it and then they write thoughtful reviews and then they remain hidden unless a paper is accepted. So I think the PRC model will make the knowledge available to the wider community. And as I think Megan and Juan were also saying, it will hopefully help to reshape the review process itself. So the idea is that it should become more constructive. Because when you know that your assessment will be read by the entire world rather than just the authors, that is going, you will likely put more effort into making your comments as helpful as possible. At least that's the idea. And I think, yeah, it's a wonderful idea. And I hope that it's going to work in deep change publishing. Cool. Maybe we should take some, thanks everybody. Good. I agree with all those comments. Maybe we should take some questions now, Maria. So Adam Claridge Chang had a few questions. He's just raised his hand. Hello. Hi. Hi. Yeah, this is Adam Claridge Chang. Yeah, so thanks for the great presentation and thanks for the excellent change in policy. I think this is a breath of fresh air to transform the way that researchers evaluated. I guess my question is that I'm a bit of a peer-review skeptic. So there's a fair amount of evidence that evaluation doesn't catch errors, that it doesn't necessarily overall increase the quality of work. And I'm concerned that, so Flores just mentioned that scientists should spend more time evaluating, more effort writing peer-review. And I think there's an argument to be made that actually peer-review could be something of a waste of time akin to the existing system that's in place with peer-review and this relentless evaluation with very little effort spent on replication. And the funding bodies and the journals refuse to support replication studies in the capacity to which I think they should. And I'm just wondering, I know E-Life in the past has published replication studies, but I'm just wondering what the state of the policy is now with regard to replication studies. Are they seen as second-class citizens the way that most scientists view them or are they going to be elevated to something a little bit more noble since they are the underpinning of what is scientific, right? Is there anyone to that? I can take it if no one else. I'm happy either way. So I think that the two ways to answer that question. The first is that E-Life has invested hugely in replication, whole entire replication projects where they have, where we have effectively been involved in the commissioning and organizing of entire replication projects and committed to publish the whole thing in cancer biology and various other fields, not yet in neuroscience. But we are totally on board with the fact that replication is important and we have, we have invested time, effort and money in that concept in the past and still do. Then there's the general submission process to E-Life where my experience of it, so I don't think we have an explicit policy, maybe we should. My experience of it is that replications are treated much more seriously at E-Life than at other journals potentially because it's actually run by scientists. But I think that still is the case that we will evaluate whether we think of replication study is of substantive interest. We have definitely published lots of failures to replicate. I think that we have, through the standard channels, we do publish simple replications through the standard channels, but I think mostly when it's controversial or when we think it's of particular interest to publish a replication study, maybe we should have a, so one of the things that I find most attractive about this new world is that we no longer, we no longer are focusing on whether we publish something or not. And so I think that it will mean that editors are much freer to evaluate things or to peer review things if they think that peer reviewing is valuable rather than publishing it is valuable if you see what I mean. And it will allow us to be much clearer about why we think it's valuable. So I think that we will therefore, for example, we can happily say this is an extremely valuable thing because it makes it add robustness to the literature and divorce that from something that's extremely valuable thing because it's a creative interesting piece of theorizing. And both we can acknowledge that both things are totally valuable for totally different regions and we don't have to have this like Berkson's paradox where you end up with either one thing or the other being good enough to get you into eLife if you see what I mean. Does that make clear? I wanted to, can I follow up on that a little bit because there's also I think a related question here about the separation of whether it's suitable for eLife and the peer review process because there's also a question here that asks about if there are way more preprints than eLife has capacity for how will the preprints to review be selected? So I think it's important to remind people that there is still a phase of the process once you submit a paper to eLife where a group of editors actually assess the paper and decide whether or not to send it out for peer review. So that is still happening. It's not like we send every paper that comes to eLife out for peer review and then it goes through this public process. This public process is only for the papers that the eLife editors decide are going to go through that next stage of the process just to clarify that for everybody. Did that answer your question that I'm not sure? Yeah, that answers my question. I mean, I don't want to derail the conversation because I think that what you guys are doing is very important and it's definitely stepping in the right direction. It's just, I think that... You don't believe in peer review. Sorry. I think that question is one for a different day. I'm happy to hear that eLife is very supportive of replication studies and it's on your mind. Thank you, Adam. We also got a question from Jun Han Chan about becoming an editor for eLife. So they said, good to learn that you're recruiting more Asia-based living editors while I have published three papers with eLife, all very good experience. I never got a chance to review any eLife manuscript. How do I apply to serve as a reviewing editor? So currently, the way of getting into being a reviewing editor is being effectively suggested by existing editors or it's been suggested by existing editors and then going through a process of us figuring out what we need in terms of covering, in terms of coverage. We are totally aware that that introduces nepotism and biases and so we will, I think, be much more in the future doing open calls for reviewing editors and so you're likely to see those in neuroscience and they're likely to be, for particular, to resolve issues we have with geographical diversity, that kind of stuff. So I think that will be true in the future. If you're particularly interested to help us now, then sure, send your CV to Maria and I and I don't actually know what field you're in, but if you think there's a particular senior editor in your field that is relevant, then you could tell us their name as well and we can open it up. We have also a question from Horan Shuldiner. So this is a question for the life leadership about the distribution of the panel today in terms of scope of research. The vast majority here represented today in systems behavioural cognition neuroscientists and we don't have anyone representing the neurodevelopment side. So the question is whether this is an intentional decision or whether we are looking to diversify in terms of scope as well. Tim, would you like to comment on that? So that is partly true, it's not completely true. We have people with model organisms, we have two senior editors in model organisms, so we have Pialli and we have Ron Calabresi and we also have neurodevelopment, Marianne Bronner handles quite a lot of that and Huda Zogbi handles quite a lot of that. We're actually just recruiting another senior editor as well. But I think you're right in your take that our scope is systems and disease more than development and model organisms. I think that's right and it's definitely not a conscious decision. It's been done in response mode and it's quite ironic given Eve's background by the way, who started the neuroscience at Elife. The answer is we recruit more editors when we have pressure in particular areas and we have therefore recruited more in areas where we've got more submissions and that is how it's happened. It may be a reflection of the size of those fields and it also may be a reflection of a sort of virtuous or vicious cycle, whichever way you want to look at it, whereby if you have more editors in that field you end up recruiting more papers in that field. So maybe perhaps we could have, it's an interesting thought that I haven't had. We could perhaps have a particular push in some particular fields to try and equalize what we're doing. But I don't think it's fair to say we don't have editors in those domains. We definitely do but I think you're right that we have more editors in systems and cognitive. Thank you Tim. We have a question from Danai Riga who says bioarchive support discussion comments from the general audience. Would you like reviews and editors taking to account that discussion for final decision on accepting slash curating a manuscript? Can you just read that again so I was going to find it while you were reading it? Sure. Oh you know I've got it. So I mean it, yeah I guess maybe somebody else wants to, I guess it's a policy, well maybe somebody else wants to have a look at that. So the answer is not at the moment but like we could and we might, like there's so many things that we can do, like for example we're talking about doing open calls for reviewers. So to have a page on the eLife website where we announce what papers are under review because they're all on bioarchive anyway so anybody can comment on them and so we're talking about those kinds of things. There are obvious risks, right? There are obvious risks that your mates might be writing those or when we, and so it's hard for us to evaluate and so all of these exciting new ideas that come with changing how peer review works are under consideration and we're open to trying these things and we're aware that there are potential, we're in a whole new world, there are potential biases and risks and problems with all of them and I think that we'd have to be pretty careful about accepting general audience things because once the authors knew that then their mates would start writing comments on bioarchive for them and so there's tensions there but we're thinking about these issues. Yeah just to chip in here as well so I would agree. So I think it's an interesting idea but at the same time I mean what Tim suggests could be happening but also the opposite could happen, right? That opponents or people that have a different idea would start writing their review that would then be taken into account. So there is something to be said for like a careful selection of unbiased reviewers when taking into account also the wishes of the authors there and that I think is becoming harder when you would open it up to the entire world. But one thing to say I think is that we envisage in the future that we are just one so we're just one of many people that would evaluate a manuscript rather than being the gatekeeper. We envisage a situation where I don't know if you've got an interesting medical problem that you're taking a new statistical technique to then different people like the journal of interesting medical problems might evaluate it but also the journal of complicated statistical techniques might evaluate it and different people should be responsible for saying this is an interesting medical problem versus this is a rigorous piece of statistics. And so I think in the long term once it's all everything's open I think that there needs to be a way of managing this the combined set of complicated opinions about a manuscript and that can never be done in solely in a closed system by one body and so yeah we're building we're building these tools to help this evaluation this tool called sciety which is in its which is just in nascent form right now but but whereby we can combine evaluations from multiple different bodies about a single manuscript. Thank you Tim. We have another question from Robin. Is there a risk that this model gives editors more influence? If the target model at eLife is not publishing anymore then the selected for eLife review will be the prestige marker which is now controlled by the editors alone without any review input. Although the reviews are public the first order assessment by people with the time to read the paper or the views will still be with the journal. Maybe Juan you want to take or somebody apart from me to talk. Megan would you like the response? I can't unless Juan. No you first I still didn't get this question. Okay it's related to the previous question when I was highlighting the fact that there's still this consultation among the reviewers of whether or not to send out papers for review and I think it's a good point. I think that everything we've said about the transparency still needs to have a little bit of an asterisk because that stage is still an important part of the review process at eLife but I think I would echo again what Tim was just saying which is that eLife is making this move not just to change how eLife works but ideally to change how publishing works in general and so you know I think the hope is that eLife won't be the only journal doing this and this won't be the only gatekeeping step for getting your paper reviewed you know on on bioarchive print this way so hopefully that will minimize the problem and I mean at the end I think as long as there's some sort of evaluation process these things will always be issues but I think the idea is hoping to move things in the right direction and just get things started rather than being the sole arbiter of you know certainly not the goal is is to create this extra layer of prestige all I think it's an interesting point whether selected for eLife review will become a prestige marker let's hope not. I think as Tim said though we could also at some point choose to review papers not because we think they're excellent but because it's important to review them right so because they might be making sweeping statements that might be completely unwarranted so in that sense my hope would be that people will read a little bit more than just like this has been reviewed by eLife and also actually read what the review says right and then I think this problem will be mitigated to some extent because then if you read the review and it actually says well the claims in this paper fully unwarranted I don't think that will be a prestige marker. To my knowledge we've got twice so far in neuroscience papers we've opted to review things because we were so angry about the bio archive preprint that we wanted to make comments on it so there are two there are two examples of that we've done so far. Brian did you want to comment? Yeah so I think I also learned more from today's panel yeah I agree think about you look at you watch some news or you watch some findings and many people are feel free to make comments and so the decision and the review's comments are just a one one way to how to say to evaluate to work so I totally agree that decision whether it's expected or rejection it's not just a binary decision because you've got so many helpful and respectful or constructive comments from the scientists so I think yeah that that's a way like everybody I mean scientists in the world need to how to say learn this process and be you know accept this new way because in my personal opinion I always think like Eli is quite brave to implement many how to say yeah like very new new steps to try to change what people think about how their paper should be read by scientists how their paper should be decided and that's a I think that's the main thing with Eli so yes or no it's not the the final answer I think the answer is like you have more scientists to know your paper and give you suggestions and that one could be used as a label attached to your to your work so for me I mean in my personal experience because I was also rejected by Eli I think I learned a lot from those those comments yeah that that yeah I just want to add a little bit thank you one we have a question from Catherine Hall that says in the future model when Eli as a publisher is defunct would you envision any papers the papers to be typeset or to just look like bio archive articles with associated comments so um bio archive now is has is now XML or whatever I don't know I don't I should know so uh so um I I imagine all sorts of um automated possibilities for for making bio archive papers look beautiful which were not the case when they were PDFs are now available and I imagine they're going to flood online over the next few years and I imagine bio archive papers will start looking beautiful pretty quickly that's what I imagine um uh yeah exactly I don't I um that's that changes big I think um so bio archive are doing that yeah and there are already templates out there right for even for making PDFs so so I I've received more than one submission to Eli that's actually formatted already in Eli's design template which is a choice that the authors make already so yeah so ladies are talking about preprint about um uh register reports um so uh we talked long and hard about pre-registration registered registered reports um here's the thing a register report says this it says here's my plan if I execute this plan you uh you guarantee to publish it uh which is uh admirable uh Eli says this we don't believe publishing is relevant so it's so it's complicated to know what we should do about register reports which just asks us for the one thing we don't want to give which is publishing and so I think that actually in this new world um uh it's going to be fine right because we can just give you a badge of on your article we you can you can submit you can submit to osf and we can make a special badge which says this was pre-registered and that will then give you the it's just one form of credit in the same way that being interesting as another form of credit and we're really happy we'll be really happy to do that to to highlight you specifically because it's a better paper because it was pre-registered and we'll definitely do that in fact we might even just borrow all the osf badges and and work with them I mean with the discussions about doing that and so uh so so that's really why where I think we're going to go I think adopting register reports for the elive journal part would be a real side step from what we think should happen in general to publishing which I think which is which is uh which is we don't think that there should be any gatekeeping in publishing there should be gatekeeping I understand there's a bit of hypocrisy there because there still is gatekeeping at elive but it's a weird message to be sending out I think um and so we're in two minds but I guess what will happen is we will adopt all of the osf badges and allow you to to highlight the fact that your study is pre-registered on osf but we won't be having separate article types for basically we don't want to have article types at all we just want to have evaluation types we want your article to be on bio archive and we want to be evaluating it different and if one of the cool things that's happened is you've pre-registered it that's great and we'll give you a badge saying this is this makes it a better paper that's that's I think where we'll go with that thank you Tim um so we're uh two minutes at a time so I suggest we can um maybe start wrapping up would you like to do the honors so hang on I was that addressed to me Maria yes I just wanted to ask you whether you'd like to thank everyone for for joining us yes I would uh I so yeah I just wanted to thank the um attendees for coming but and also thank the editors for their time and in answering everybody's questions so that's really nice of you and um and we hope that you will um embrace the new um the new philosophy and um come and join us and try and publish your life thank you thanks and I thank you all for joining thanks for your time thanks for