Some journals could become publishing platforms over time, shedding editorial gatekeeper roles. A publishing trial at eLife is exploring the impact of forgoing editorial rejection after peer review [ 22 ]. The editorial gatekeeper role before peer review could be replaced when it becomes feasible and culturally acceptable to use community approaches or algorithms to allocate peer reviewer resources wisely. The F1000Research platform uses authors instead of editors to select reviewers [ 18 ]. Bioverlay uses academic editors to select preprints for peer review. Alternatively, scientists could self-select to review preprints [ 23 ]. Further experimentation with different peer review models could improve efficiency and quality of peer review on publishing platforms.

We envision a platform infrastructure that enables different providers to offer diverse services—publication of versioned articles from preprints to the final version of record, quality controls before publication, peer review, copy editing, post-publication curation, etc. One business model would enable service providers to charge a fee for service. Competition among service providers could create an environment of experimentation on publishing platforms that would, over time, identify the most valuable and cost-effective services. There is an argument for research funders to financially support publishing platforms and the services that run on them, at least until publishing volume has increased to levels that can sustain the platforms through service fees. Current leaders in this effort include the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which support their own open research platforms [ 19 , 20 ], and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which supports bioRxiv [ 21 ].

Open-access publishing platforms are positioned to increasingly complement—and perhaps eventually replace—journals as major publication venues for primary research articles. High-volume publishing on these platforms allows primary research to be published faster, because authors decide when to publish original and revised articles. The platforms are typically cheaper than journals because they don’t include expensive editorial curation associated with high rejection rates. Overall, the combined cost of publication on platforms and post-publication curation can be significantly lower than the current cost of journals because many primary research articles may not need post-publication curation; in fact, some fraction of specialized articles may not even need formal peer review, because the few scientists who access these articles on preprint servers can quickly evaluate rigor and quality of the data themselves.

Author-driven dissemination in the life sciences already exists on publishing platforms. The defining feature of publishing platforms is that they empower authors to make publishing decisions. Preprint servers share author-posted articles before they undergo peer review at a journal, with no delay to dissemination. The arXiv preprint server has been used for decades in the physics community. Preprints enjoy increasing popularity in the life sciences, with bioRxiv as the biggest server [ 17 ]. Publishing platforms powered by F1000Research infrastructure go further: authors publish preprints, orchestrate the peer review process for that preprint, and publish the revised article [ 18 ].

Even if curation after publication is deemed highly valuable, it remains an untested business model. Research funders could support curation services initially, but academic libraries would ultimately have to subscribe to them to make them sustainable. It may be difficult to monetize the selection outcome itself, but scholarly reviews that justify the selections could be subscription worthy. There are opportunities to develop and experiment with new models of curation to explore what is most valuable for the scientific enterprise and sustainable for providers.

Established scientists are already overburdened with peer review requests from journals. On the upside, scientists wouldn’t be asked to conduct a full technical peer review but to select articles they (and their trainees) have already dissected in detail. And starting post-publication curation with early-career group leaders and trainees may further mitigate this challenge: early-career scientists are not yet overburdened with peer review duties, have the most to gain from building an alternative evaluation and reward system in academia, and are still directly involved in hands-on research. Trainees could be engaged in curation through mentored journal clubs, similar to their engagement in the review of preprints through preprint journal clubs [ 24 ]. Ultimately, if publishing on platforms becomes mainstream and post-publication curation is recognized as a critical service for science, the burden on scientists and editors will shift from deciding what to publish to curating what is already published.

To illustrate what this input could look like, consider the following process: Every few months, an advisory board of experts nominates articles for a given set of categories. The selection that follows the nomination process can be informed by a mix of crowdsourcing, i.e., tallying the votes of board members, and editorial judgment, i.e., weighing comments from board members. The combination of community input and independent editorial oversight ensures that the selection process is not a simple popularity contest. Selection of an article is signaled by tagging the article with a badge (see below) and can be justified with a short review.

Some selection criteria could be similar to those journals use today, including “of broad interest,” “of unusual significance,” “potentially groundbreaking but controversial,” or “rigorous and elegant.” Alternatively, curators could flag articles that are personal favorites, as F1000Prime does. A particularly valuable curation service would be to identify significant claims in published articles that are questionable or could not be validated in the community. Today, such judgments are largely restricted to the privacy of expert circles. If discoverable through reputable curation services, these judgments could motivate authors to publish rigorous research. The multidimensional nature of curation after publication means that it could capture nuances and complexities much better than traditional journals, in which both “positive” and “negative” curation typically boil down to simple decisions—whether to publish or whether to retract.

As high-volume publishing platforms continue to grow, we’ll need curation services that select articles of interest for specific target audiences. Today’s selective journals and scientific societies could be well positioned to provide such services. Future curation journals could retain many of their current features, including subscription income, independent editors and editorial boards, and nontransparent evaluations. They could exploit the above-mentioned advantages over the curation at traditional “publishing” journals in the following ways.

Finally, some badges could take full advantage of internet capabilities and be generated automatically through crowdsourcing and analytics over time (citations, readability, data usage, etc.). Altmetrics represent one existing example of article-specific metrics that aggregate citations, downloads, social media mentions, etc. [ 27 ]. A disadvantage of usage and citation metrics is that they are lagging indicators that take a long time to acrrue. To compete with a leading indicator like the JIF, it would be important to start post-publication curation and badging soon after publication while still taking advantage of community input. Because curation and badges are not “written in stone” like a publishing decision, they can be revised over time, providing a mechanism for modifying or correcting earlier judgments.

One way to dissuade the use of journal-level metrics like the JIF in the evaluation of scientists is to develop better proxies that reflect quality features of articles. Post-publication curation offers an opportunity to develop such proxies in the form of “badges.” Badges would capture the selection of articles in a shorthand form and would be attached to papers in a discoverable and searchable manner. Like post-publication curation, badges could be multidimensional. Authors could contribute to badging through structured citations—e.g. by flagging research and methods articles that were foundational for a given article, similar to the practice at the Current Opinions journals, which mark references that are “of outstanding interest” and “of special interest.” (For more ideas on making citations more useful, see [ 25 , 26 ].) Curation journals could contribute to badging by signaling that the selected paper satisfies the journal’s editorial standards, conveying the same information as current publishing decisions. Other badges could be generated directly on publishing platforms by aggregating peer reviewer scores or by including short summary statements that distill key aspects of the paper—originality, significance, key findings, remaining reviewer concerns, target audience, etc.

Outlook

We envision a publishing model in which dissemination and curation of scientific work are separated, making both processes more efficient and effective [28,29]. To achieve a transition to open publishing platforms and post-publication curation, the scientific community needs the self-awareness and courage to make a significant cultural shift.

Successful scientists have a vested interest in the current system. The notion that publication itself serves as a trusted “stamp of quality” is deeply ingrained, and scientists adhere instinctively to a more or less agreed-upon hierarchy of journals for judgment, reading preferences, and evaluations. As authors, they chose journals based on prestige and quality but are shielded from associated publishing costs because their libraries pay for subscription licenses. As peer reviewers, they provide critical and time-consuming services and, in exchange, gain privileged access both to unpublished work and to the “right” editors. Scientists may also interpret a call for change as an implicit criticism that they don’t execute their role well enough despite investing significant effort. It is easy to blame individuals, like editors or the “third reviewer,” for mistakes in publishing decisions. But the problems we describe here are systemic and not resolved by tackling individual misjudgments that will always be part of scientific evaluations.

Over time, however, we believe that the scientific community will come to support a progressive open publishing model that accelerates discovery and empowers scientists. Authors would spend less time and resources on getting their work published, and peer reviewers might need to review less often. Even post-publication curation could turn out to be effort neutral if it grows at the expense of pre-publication curation. To move forward, we encourage the community to push for progress on core issues such as the following.

How can we optimize the structure of peer review and the selection of peer reviewers for platform publishing? How do we determine what level of peer review an article needs in the first place—none, basic, premium? How can the peer review reports be structured—with scores and short statements of key features—to contribute most effectively to subsequent post-publication curation and badges?

How do we set up an infrastructure and culture for post-publication curation? How do we decide on suitable categories for selection? How should we identify work that didn’t stand the test of time?

Finally, what business models are best suited to support sharing of primary research articles on platforms and post-publication curation?

Publishers, scientific societies, academic institutions and their libraries, and funders can play critical roles in addressing these issues. Publishers can experiment with publishing platforms. Scientific societies can use the expertise of their members to orchestrate fee-for-service peer review on publishing platforms and subscription-based curation services. Libraries may be able to support curation journals when publication of primary research articles shifts towards cheaper publishing platforms, liberating funds that are currently spent on traditional subscription journals.

Research funders are uniquely positioned to promote change because we sit at the nexus of two interconnected functions—the sharing of research outputs and the evaluation of scientists. Many funders see it as our responsibility to support practices that disseminate research outputs openly and efficiently and evaluate scientists’ work based on intrinsic merit. The evaluation of scientists in academia places heavy emphasis on where and how much they publish, rather than what they publish. If these incentives don’t change, scientists will continue to publish in a manner that perpetuates the current problems. Changes in academic incentives cannot come from publishers. Funders and academic institutions need to commit to evaluate science and scientists independent of the publication venue [1]. Developing and sharing principles on how to evaluate scientists and learning from each other how to implement them will set us on a path to better incentives and rewards for rigorous and enduring research. One example of work in this area is the Open Research Funders Group, a community of practice.

In addition to supporting changes in the academic incentive system, funders can catalyze changes in publishing by encouraging and supporting publishing platforms, pilot studies on peer review, and new forms of post-publication curation. Such pilots should measure their impact on authors, reviewers, and readers and should be scalable. Their outputs should contribute to the evaluation of scientists and scientific work.

By fostering an environment for experiments in publication and evaluation and continuously assessing and building on effective practices, we can together develop services that best support science in the digital age. We stand to gain fairer, more effective ways to communicate findings, share data, and develop the next generation of scientists. At Howard Hughes Medical Institute, we believe this is the future of publishing. We are moving toward it.