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Summary

eLife reviews preprints in the life sciences and medicine, and is committed to improving peer review to better convey the assessments made by editors and reviewers. Our approach brings together the immediacy and openness of a preprint with the scrutiny of peer review by experts.

Evaluation model

Our approach brings together the immediacy and openness of a preprint with the scrutiny of peer review by experts.

• We only review articles that have been made available as preprints.
• Editors who are active researchers decide which preprints are reviewed.
• Editors and reviewers discuss the reviews with each other.
• There is no accept/reject decision after peer review: rather, every article we review is published on the eLife website as a Reviewed Preprint that includes an eLife assessment, public reviews, and a response from the authors (if available).
• We do not artificially limit the number of articles we review or publish.
• At any point following peer review, authors can choose to have their Reviewed Preprint published as a regular journal article (known as the Version of Record) to mark the end of the publishing process.

Read more about eLife.

PReF

Sciety uses the PReF (preprint review features) descriptors to describe key elements of each Group's evaluation activities, helping readers to interpret and compare their evaluations. Learn more.

Review requested by

Authors

Reviewer selected by

Editor, service, or community

Public interaction

No

Inclusion of author response

Yes

Decision

Other scale or rating

Review coverage

Complete paper

Reviewer identity known to

Editor or service

Competing interests

Checked

People

Our editors.

Content license

Unless otherwise indicated, the articles and journal content published by eLife on the eLife Sites are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (also known as a CC-BY license). This means that you are free to use, reproduce and distribute the articles and related content (unless otherwise noted), for commercial and noncommercial purposes, subject to citation of the original source in accordance with the CC-BY license. For more information see the eLife terms and conditions.