Damian Pattinson’s interview for the ATG Podcast has just been released, and it reveals some fascinating details about his background, and about the eLife publishing model.
It turns out that Damian’s father was a bookseller, so publishing was in the family – and which perhaps explains his move from neuroscience research to publishing, starting with BMJ. Damian worked at PLOS from 2010, at the time of its dramatic growth, when Open Access was becoming more widely accepted. Pattinson describes how commercial publishers suddenly took an interest in OA, adding “complexity and confusion” via such tactics as the hybrid journal model. The next obstacle to OA was the impression that OA publication was of lower quality, second-best to publishing in a subscription journal. His move to eLife, in 2020, was to further eLife’s mission to “challenge the status quo”, by publishing the highest-quality research in OA format.
The model that eLife is moving to is the “publish, review, curate” model outlined by Stern and O’Shea in 2019. Pattinson explained how, in 2022, the model was set up with every paper made available as a preprint, typically on bioRxiv, with a review of the preprint on the eLife website (hence a “reviewed preprint”). The value of this approach is to move away from a “binary decision” by which you either got into the journal or you didn’t, to a more nuanced valuation. “Rather than having a kind of gatekeeping function … instead we say this paper is extremely good for these reasons, or this paper has flaws, and as a reader, you should know what those flaws are.”
One benefit of this approach is getting away from journal publishing – after all “nobody knows what the acceptance criteria is for any journal.” The radicalism of the publish, review, curate model is that “if the model were done fully, then the idea of getting into a journal ceases to matter.”
As for payment, authors pay when their article is sent for peer review, which is somewhere in the middle between subscription journals, no payment if accepted, and typical OA journals, with payment on acceptance. Instead of publication, with eLife every peer-reviewed paper is guaranteed the status of “reviewed preprint”. We have to take on trust that eLife’s selection criteria at this point is quite rigorous; other, less scrupulous journals might well charge fees more widely.
Whatever the terminology, it wasn’t sufficient for Clarivate, who stated they would not provide an impact factor for eLife in 2025 (the exact term is that eLife would only be “partially indexed”). eLife argues for “validation by peer review”, with any judgement should be at the level of the article, rather than the level of the journal. Paradoxically, the high status of eLife in academic circles ensures it will continue to receive high-quality submissions, with or without an impact factor. “We don’t need an impact factor. You can see the quality of each paper by looking at each paper.”
More fundamentally, Pattinson suggested that scholarly publishing remains locked in a situation of “artificial scarcity, even of word counts in some journals”, while the reality is that there is no limit to how much we can publish – “it’s up to come up with ways of filtering and checking it for accuracy”.
Finally, Pattinson talks about some of the terms used by the eLife reviewers, such as “landmark”, “important”, and “convincing”, to describe the submitted articles in a kind of standardized way.
All in all, the interview is a very well-argued and convincing justification for fundamental change in scholarly publishing, with the publish-review-curate model a viable way forward.
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