The Center for Open Science (COS) is conducting a 3-year research and development project called Lifecycle Journal to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and suitability for transition into a scalable and sustainable solution for scholarly communication. Lifecycle Journal is a new transparent model that aims to revolutionize scholarly communication by putting publishing and evaluation in the control of the scholarly community itself. In place of rewards based on publication and journal status that treat the paper as the only meaningful scholarly output, Lifecycle Journal aims to shift the focus so that doing credible research is itself rewarded.
With a Diamond Open Access publish-before-review model, Lifecycle Journal aims to transform the vision and value of a journal as an effective facilitator of knowledge production and self-correction. Lifecycle Journal commits to transparency in innovation, evaluation, and continuous improvement in order to raise the quality and trustworthiness of the published research, reduce bias and increase overall accountability.
Submissions will be immediately published and made openly available on the Lifecycle Journal website. The research is then evaluated and all peer review will be transparently accessible to readers when assessments are complete. By making evaluation independent of publishing, publication as the key incentive for authors is removed, and it is instead replaced with substantive evaluation.
Lifecycle Journal offers a dynamic community-led collection of human, machine, and empirical credibility assessments. Submissions will receive assessment from one or more evaluation services within our community, depending on scope and suitability. Experimentation is welcomed, and successful forms of evaluation will be more closely integrated with visible assessment of the scholarship.
Submissions will not receive a final accept or reject decision from the journal. Instead, authors are empowered to decide when they are finished with the active phase of revising and responding to evaluations by optionally declaring the present version the Version of Record (VOR). Authors who decline to assign a VOR might instead decide to submit the project to another journal. Authors can declare the VOR anytime after the submission is made openly available on Lifecycle Journal.
Lifecycle Journal enables research outputs to be published and evaluated at different stages of the research lifecycle and across disciplines. Authors can submit and have their work evaluated at the research planning stage before the research has been conducted and/or at the outcomes reporting stage.
Lifecycle Journal will be open for submissions in January 2025. Sign up for project updates and join us to push the innovation envelope by developing and testing a scalable, transformational model for scholarly communication and publishing.