By Andy Collings, eLife Executive Editor
On June 26, eLife announced a trial to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a form of peer review that gives authors control over how to respond to the issues raised (see Peer review: eLife trials a new approach). We announced that we would stop the trial once we had received 300 submissions, so that we could evaluate the outcomes and consider the next steps.
The trial has been running for around six weeks and we have just exceeded the target of 300 authors opting in, which corresponds to almost a third of all submissions while the trial was running. We have therefore now removed the trial option for new submissions.
At this stage, an initial decision has not yet been rendered for all the submissions within the trial, but we expect that initial phase to be completed over the next few weeks. It will then take several months for articles to be published once the submissions have been peer-reviewed and revised.
We are currently collecting and analysing data, and we plan to share findings related to the initial decision process as soon as we can. For now, we very much appreciate the support from the authors, editors, and reviewers who are participating, and we have been grateful for many comments about the approach. We have received many messages of support as well as constructive criticism and questions.
Questions and comments are welcome. Please annotate publicly on the article or contact us at hello [at] elifesciences [dot] org.
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