Annual Report: 2025 in review

When I accepted the role of Chair of the eLife Board at the beginning of 2026, I did so because I believe the questions that eLife is asking are among the most important facing science today: how should research be evaluated? What responsibilities do publishers have beyond disseminating papers? How can we build a scholarly communication system that better serves researchers, institutions and society? These are not new questions, but they have become increasingly urgent.

Looking back on 2025, I am struck less by any single milestone than by the remarkable consistency with which eLife continued to pursue its mission. In a year that tested many assumptions about scholarly publishing, the organisation remained focused on demonstrating that research communication can be faster, more transparent, more equitable and more useful to science itself. Rather than retreating from that ambition, eLife continued to invest in it.

The third year of the publish-review-curate (PRC) model marked another important step in that journey. Increasingly, the conversation is shifting from whether publishing can be done differently to how new approaches can better recognise the quality of research itself, rather than the prestige of the venue in which it appears. Throughout 2025, eLife continued to make the case that openness, expert evaluation, and responsible assessment are mutually reinforcing, not competing, objectives.

What particularly encourages me is that this work is not being pursued in isolation. The growing support from funders, universities, research organisations, and individual scientists demonstrates that many across the global research community recognise the need for change. Lasting reform cannot be delivered by any one publisher or institution acting alone. It depends upon collective leadership and a willingness to build new norms together. eLife has become an important catalyst within that broader movement.

The report also illustrates something that is easy to overlook. Innovation in scholarly communication is not only about new editorial models. It depends equally upon investment in open infrastructure, high-quality metadata, thoughtful user experience, and technologies that make research more discoverable, connected and reusable. These are public goods that strengthen the entire research ecosystem, extending well beyond eLife itself.

As Chair, I also recognise that transformation is rarely straightforward. Organisations that seek to change established systems inevitably encounter uncertainty, criticism and difficult choices. Good governance is therefore not simply about overseeing an organisation's performance; it is about ensuring that the organisation remains faithful to its mission while adapting thoughtfully to an evolving landscape. The Board's responsibility is to provide that stewardship. We remain committed to supporting eLife's leadership, editors, staff, and wider community as they continue to challenge assumptions, develop new approaches and demonstrate what a more open, transparent and trustworthy system of research communication can look like.

Science advances because knowledge is continually scrutinised, refined and shared. Our systems for communicating that knowledge should embody those same values. That is the future eLife is working towards, and I am honoured to help steward that journey.

Kamran Naim
Head of Open Science, CERN
Chair, eLife Board of Directors

Towards the end of 2024, we said a key focus for eLife in 2025 would be to explore working with like-minded organisations to help drive necessary change in research culture and evaluation away from journal-based metrics and towards more responsible methods of assessment.

We kicked off that work with a large-scale campaign that involved speaking to funders and institutions around the world to gather their views on our PRC model and what they think about the continued use of the Impact Factor in research assessment. We were pleased to announce that more than 100 organisations (over 95% of respondents) confirmed that they still consider eLife papers in research evaluation – an announcement that generated coverage in high-profile industry newsletters and publications including Times Higher Education, Research Professional News and Research Information. Our conversations with the community signalled a growing momentum behind more meaningful methods of research assessment, such as the one offered by our PRC model, and set us on a course to continue advocating for the wide and lasting reform that many in the community wish to see.

Indeed, following the announcement, our Executive Director Damian Pattinson and Content Manager George Currie made a case in Learned Publishing for ‘science-led publishing’ over ‘publisher-led science’ – in which they argued for a publishing approach that would accelerate research communication, incentivise collaboration between authors, editors and reviewers, and create a more transparent and equitable research landscape. Later in the year, Pattinson also published a piece in Laboratory News on how our reliance upon the Impact Factor is destroying public trust in science and the need to move beyond its limitations. And in July, our Chief Publishing Officer Fiona Hutton and Chief Magazine Editor Peter Rodgers, together with Pattinson, highlighted in a DORA blog post the challenges that journals and peer review face in changing for the better when indexers have the power to stifle innovation. In these and other speaking opportunities, we were able to showcase PRC as an example of how the system can, and should, be improved.

Stepping back to March, we published a two-year update on our model, exploring the milestones and accomplishments since its launch. This included key insights around submissions, publications and eLife Assessments, as well as top research and author case studies, which we also continued to publish throughout 2025: Hironori Funabiki, Mark Boothby, Magdalena Solyga and an author team all shared their experiences of publishing with us.

This update came among a flurry of other announcements at the start of the 2025, including that Timothy (Tim) Behrens had joined as eLife Editor-in-Chief following his time in the role with Detlef Weigel in 2024. As a long-time supporter and contributor to eLife’s work, we felt he was the perfect candidate to steer eLife forward in our efforts to transform research communication and assessment, while Weigel remained with us as Senior Editor. A month later, we were pleased to welcome new members of our Board of Directors, adding further strength behind our mission.

In February, we were pleased to be announced as the winner of the industry-renowned UX Award 2025 for our user-driven approach to the design of Reviewed Preprints. Established by OpenAthens, this award recognises publishers and library systems vendors that have developed the best user experience and journey to their content and services. eLife is named alongside Cambridge University Press, Sage Publishing, De Gruyter, nkoda and Emerald Publishing as previous winners of this important accolade. We were also named as a winner of the inaugural Crossref Metadata Excellence and Enrichment Awards in May, which celebrate exemplary metadata practices among Crossref’s members. This award was given to us due to our consistently high metadata completeness – for example, 98% of eLife journal articles include ROR IDs for author and editor affiliations, 99% contain authenticated ORCID iDs, and extensive use of Crossref’s relationships ensures machine readable connections to other research outputs. In addition to having the visible aspects of our PRC model recognised through the UX Award, this latter accolade reflected our leadership in the work that goes on behind the scenes to support best open science practices. Our team explained more on the Crossref blog about how and why we’re dedicated to producing such high-quality open metadata.

Adding to these announcements, we were pleased to introduce our open-access publishing agreements in the summer with the aim of promoting a more equitable, inclusive and sustainable system for science publishing. These include the uncapped scheme that typically helps institutions support their researchers to publish open access – in eLife’s case, unlocking opportunities for researchers to try a whole new way of publishing through our PRC model. Following the launch, we announced that two leading UK universities had signed up to the scheme: Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield. As signatories of DORA, they share a common view that journal-level metrics should be avoided in favour of more effective methods of research assessment. We were delighted to have them on board with us.

Finally, we carried out a substantial amount of outreach during 2025 by participating in a large number of scientific and publishing events. To highlight just a few, we attended the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, where eLife Reviewing Editor Patricia Bassereau also joined a panel to discuss current and future landscapes of review and publishing; discussed who should bear the burden of maintaining the integrity of the scientific record at the UKSG Annual Conference; spoke about the diversification and decentralisation of peer review at the SSP 47th Annual Meeting; and presented an analysis of the common vocabulary terms used in eLife Assessments at the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. We plan to continue attending these and/or similar events each year as we speak up for change in research communication, review, and assessment.

Another focus for eLife in 2025 was to continue developing our PRC model to make it the best it can be for our communities. Our Technology and Innovation team did just that in 2025, while also continuing to collaborate on solutions to support the wider open publishing ecosystem.

In March, the team published an update on the improvements they had made to how readers browse and discover research in eLife – many of which were considered as part of our winning entry for the UX Award 2025. The changes summarised in the article cover three areas: the first being our new journal browse page that helps readers find the research they’re looking for without searching based on keywords; the second being changes to our journal search, where results now show the stage of each article from Version 1 to the final Version of Record; and the third involving work to make eLife Assessments more prominent on article pages and explaining what their common vocabulary means. Together, these changes led to notable improvements in how readers engage with and understand the research content published through our model.

In May, the team also introduced a new website to better showcase the work we’re doing more widely to improve research communication through innovative technologies, integrated services, and sustainable infrastructure solutions. It is some of this work that would lead us to win new funding in support of our efforts to build an open and collaborative ecosystem for alternative approaches to scholarly communication.

The team also started work, supported by NLNet Foundation, on bringing social discourse into the scholarly record by creating an Open Science flavour of the Bonfire social network dedicated to discussing preprints. Linked to Sciety, this allows individuals to make links between preprints and add commentary that would otherwise be lost in a broader social media platform.

In November, eLife’s Chief Technology Officer Paul Shannon and Head of Innovation Initiatives Michael Markie attended a three-day workshop in San Diego with other technology and publishing experts, entitled ‘From Tools to Adoption: A Path to Modular and Interactive Scientific Publishing’. This implementation sprint saw the creation of a new converged standard around interoperable, structured scientific content called the Open Exchange Architecture, or OXA. As part of this meeting, the team ran a day-long “vibe-coding” session to build a simple web app that brought together all of the standards at the meeting, showcasing structured documents, review, curation, licensing, and data availability.

As a final key focus for eLife in 2025, we said that we would continue working with our dedicated communities to find and promote more transparent and accountable ways of publishing research, and we’re pleased to share some of the work that took place throughout the year.

This begins with the eLife Global South Committee – a group that brings together researchers in the Global South to guide us in the pursuit of more inclusive, equitable and diverse scientific communication. At the start of the year, we published a reflection from the Committee of the activities they undertook in 2024 to connect researchers and initiatives dedicated to open science across the world. Their notable achievements included hosting two webinars – “Promoting Open Science in and from the Global South” and ”Mapping the Open Science Landscape in the Global South” – which served as opportunities to exchange experiences and identify commonalities and differences in the state of open science across regions and countries. The article also outlined their next steps for 2025, including an update on three new members to support its work and help increase its reach in the Caribbean, Indian subcontinent, and Latin America.

Later in the year, the Committee also worked on its first collaborative publication around the role of the Global South in innovative scholarly communication. They published the paper, titled ‘Reflections on the Global South's Impact on Scholarly Communication: Historical Context, Current Dynamics, and Future Pathways’, as a preprint and wrote an accompanying Feature Article in eLife.

2025 also saw 107 early-career researchers join the eLife Ambassadors programme – an initiative to train and equip the community in their quest to champion open science principles. The 2025/26 cohort attended training sessions in a number of areas in 2025, including effective leadership with Nadine Buckland; Open Peer Review training with PREreview; Community Engagement and Advocacy training with Dr Fátima Sancheznieto; an introduction to federated preprint commentary via Sciety and Bonfire Networks with Mark Williams; and Open Science and Global Research Culture training with Emmanuel Boakye of the African Reproducibility Network (AREN).

Meanwhile, eLife’s Early-Career Advisory Group (ECAG) welcomed Gang Xue as a new member of the group. Xue obtained his PhD from Peking University, China, and is currently based at Harvard Medical School, US. The ECAG is pleased to have Xue and his fresh perspective on the team as they continue working to help improve scholarly publishing in the life sciences and medicine.

Challenging the status quo in scientific publishing and assessment is no simple task. The nature of the system means that we need a global movement to push for better alternatives – we are unable to do this alone, and are grateful to our communities for their support.