Today we share our three-year strategy, outlining our goals for 2026–28. Although eLife has been around for 15 years, this is the first time we have made our strategy public. Why now? Well, it has been an eventful few years for us, and we feel it is useful to share where we are going next. But we are also at a pivotal juncture as an organisation: we have been running our new publishing model for three years; we have challenged the way research is assessed by standing up against the tyranny of the impact factor; we have received significant new funding to build open-source technology; and we are changing our governance structure to better support our ambitions. All these changes mean that it is a good time to reposition ourselves as an organisation and clarify our priorities.
The first part of this is to revise our mission statement to better reflect our role as a publisher, technology provider and advocate for change. Our mission statement now states:
eLife is a non-profit organisation advancing open science by transforming how research is communicated, reviewed, and assessed. By developing open tools and collaborating with research communities, institutions, and funders, we are building a fairer, more effective global research ecosystem.
Our three-year strategy is divided into four areas:
Publishing
eLife has always been known first and foremost as a journal. We were launched with the aim of publishing high-impact research in a fully open-access format, improving peer review, and taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by digital media. In these goals we were successful. Later we embraced preprints, and in 2023 we adopted a publish-review-curate (PRC) model. Under this approach, every article we review is published on the eLife website, along with feedback from the reviewers, and an assessment that summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of the article. PRC therefore combines the speed and openness of preprints with the scrutiny offered by peer review, and allows articles to be assessed on their scientific content rather than journal impact factor.
Having proved that the model works on the journal, we wish to encourage others to adopt similar PRC models, allowing more researchers to participate, and creating a genuine alternative to the current system where research is judged on where it is published, not what is published. We will also continue to innovate on the journal, making papers more dynamic, useful, and machine-readable.
Technology
eLife has always invested heavily in innovative open-source technology. Our own systems power the journal; our partnerships have helped deliver key infrastructure such as Sciety, Kotahi, eLife Lens and COAR Notify; and our innovation initiatives have helped launch products such as Plaudit, Research Octopus and PREreview. Our technology is now used to provide evaluation data feeds to Europe PMC and OpenRxiv, and we have won awards for excellence in UX design and metadata. Our new Wellcome funding, combined with matched funding from other sources, have given us a significant resource to grow our technology ambitions through eLife Pathways, providing more tools and services to support open science. For example we are partnering with PKP to create semantic document extraction tools based on our previous work with ScienceBeam/GROBID by adding support for LLM technology. Our goal is to continue to produce exciting, innovative software that expands access to research, grows the ecosystem, and creates long-term sustainable infrastructure.
External Impact
Our role as an advocate for change took on new meaning in 2024 when the Web of Science decided to partially-index the journal, and remove its impact factor. While we had always advocated against impact factors as a statistically-illiterate measure and a hugely corrupting factor in scientific research, the move put us in a new position to highlight the dangers of ceding control of indexing to private corporations. Since then we have received incredible support from the scientific community, and will seek to continue our work to advocate for better forms of assessment over the coming years.
Internal Capability and Culture
Finally, we will align our internal capabilities to ensure we can deliver our strategy. In addition to the updates to our governance structure and bylaws, we will diversify our revenue base, develop policies for responsible use of AI in research communication, and support our staff, editors, advisors and ambassadors to grow our movement.
These four pillars form the basis for our work to transform research communication. They represent a more mature, established organisation that is able to grow on the foundations we have built, while ensuring we stay innovative, bold and challenging to a system that so desperately needs reform.
Our full strategy is available to read here.
