Lifecycle Journal | Center for Open Science

The Center for Open Science (COS) is conducting a 3-year research and development project on a new model of scholarly communication called Lifecycle Journal to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses and suitability for transition into a scalable and sustainable solution.

1	The Lifecycle Journal will meet authors’ existing needs of the current reward system for publication, and will create pathways to realign that reward system with values of rigor, transparency, and integrity. It will include rigorous peer review with highly credible editorial leadership.
2	The Lifecycle Journal will incorporate existing innovations that are improving scholarly communication including Diamond Open Access; Publish-then-Review; Transparent and Open Peer Review; Open and FAIR data, materials, and code; CRediT taxonomy; and, Registered Reports.
3	The Lifecycle Journal will introduce innovations that will transform the vision and value of journals into effective facilitators of knowledge production and self-correction. These innovations will include incorporating several human, machine, and empirical evaluations in a dynamic marketplace of credibility assessments; versioning and updated review of published papers and other outputs; treating data, materials, and code as first-class scholarly outputs; and, publication beginning at any stage of the research lifecycle.
4	The Lifecycle Journal aims to put the operation and innovation in publishing and the reward system in the control of the scholarly community itself with community-based governance, scholar-led editorial teams, public goods infrastructure, and integrated metascience for continuous experimentation, evaluation, and improvement.

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.

With the Open Science Framework (OSF), COS provides a solution for research producers to open up their research from conception through completion to promote transparency, sharing, and rigor.

The Lifecycle Journal is the conceptual complement of OSF to facilitate the interaction between researchers as producers and consumers to promote credibility assessment, reproducibility, reuse, and self-correction. The combination will align scholarly communication with scholarly values and accelerate knowledge production.

How to Participate

Authors

The early adopter authors of the Lifecycle Journal will get substantial engagement with their research, and help shape the future of the model. Authors can submit research plans or completed reports. Authors will receive assessments from a marketplace of evaluations, and engage in scholarly discourse about one’s approach, evidence, and claims. Any area of scholarship that is represented by at least one peer review service associated with the Lifecycle Journal is eligible for submission.

Reviewers

Several of the review services offer opportunities for scholars to contribute their expertise for evaluating research — from the familiar peer review of completed reports to experimental methods in assessment. Examples of participating evaluation services are listed above. Sign up for updates and information about how to participate as a reviewer or evaluator for one or more of the evaluation services.

Evaluation Service Partner

Do you run an evaluation service for scholarly research, or do you have an innovative idea for how planned or completed research could be evaluated? Contact us to explore partnering in the marketplace of evaluation services. If you have conceived but not yet developed your approach to evaluation, you can still fill-out the form, and you are encouraged to consider applying for the Astera Institute Entrepreneur-in-Residence program.

Metascientists

Are you interested in conducting research on the Lifecycle Journal or the evaluation services it includes? We will integrate opportunities for metascience research. Sign up for updates about how to partner to conduct research on this project.

Help to fund this innovative effort: contact giving@cos.io for more information on sponsorship opportunities.

A Collaborative Project in Open Scholarship

Lifecycle Journal is COS’s next major experiment to advance its mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research, and its vision for achieving it (COS: Strategic Plan).

We envision a future scholarly community in which:

The process, content, and outcomes of research are openly accessible by default;

All scholarly content is preserved and discoverable, and openness, interoperability, and transparency are normative for scholarly services;

All stakeholders are included and respected in the research lifecycle; and

All stakeholders share pursuit of truth as the primary incentive and motivation for scholarship.

Achieving the mission requires culture change in the incentives that drive researchers’ behavior, the infrastructure that supports research, and the business models that dominate scholarly communication.

This Lifecycle Journal experiment will be a collaborative project among a community of scholars and service providers. Join us to push the innovation envelope by developing and testing a scalable, transformational model for scholarly communication and publishing.