Our story
eLife has a rich history of developing and investing in innovation and technology that improves the way research is shared and discovered.
Supporting open science through building open-source software and fostering the communities around those tools has always been part of eLife’s mission. From the very beginning we decided to write code in the open, document how to contribute and encourage others to collaborate at every opportunity.
Since 2012, eLife has been involved in many collaborations that have blossomed into impactful projects and initiatives. Our contributions have ranged from strategic guidance to significant funding and oversight, as well as direct contributions through software, machine learning, and other engineering efforts. This rich history demonstrates our commitment to nurturing open science endeavours with and for the community.
While we have successfully developed Sciety and Kotahi into distinct products and communities, we have also worked on a broader spectrum of community projects that have benefited from eLife’s skills and expertise.
To enhance the review and curation aspects of the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) model, eLife launched Sciety in 2020 as an aggregator of preprint evaluations. Sciety has expanded to showcase diverse forms of curation from groups involved in assessing early scientific outputs. Its data feeds also power evaluation content on other open science platforms like Europe PMC and bioRxiv/medRxiv.
Development on Kotahi started with a partnership with the Coko Foundation in 2017 when it was called xPub, and we’ve been evolving its capabilities ever since. In 2020, we started developing Kotahi to support the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) community driven by the specific needs from researcher-led groups such as the Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium.
The eLife publishing platform consists of a number of software components that can be reused in their own right, and has been worked on since 2012. More recently, in 2023 we launched eLife’s new publishing model that included the technology to support Reviewed Preprints. This technology is now offered as part of Kotahi and is being used by communities such as Biophysics Colab.
COAR Notify
Developing and accelerating community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach to linking research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from external services
Our involvement in COAR Notify started early through our connection with Peer Community In and Sciety. We provided use cases and connections with reviewing groups that ultimately led to funding to convene, facilitate and develop the use of COAR Notify between a number of our partners.
Phase one saw bioRxiv/medRxiv connected with PREreview, Kotahi and SciELO. Following that we integrated the technology with the first “aggregation” use case connecting Sciety to PREreview, PCI and Kotahi. Work in 2025 focuses on expanding to connect with the PubPub Platform.
PREreview
Helping researchers provide and receive constructive feedback on preprints from an international community of their peers
An eLife Sprint (a community hackday bringing technologists and academics together) started our technology relationship with PREreview where our team provided insight into user experience and design for the first version of PREreview.
Since then we have worked closely together to further the open and equitable peer review of preprints. This has taken various forms including mentorship, technology advice, providing software engineers and designers, and in 2023-24 working together on shared goals for a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Stencila
Reproducible, open and interoperable documents with built in scientific intelligence
The exploration of the “Reproducible Document Stack” in 2017 eventually evolved into version one of Stencila and the accompanying eLife Executable Research Articles – a way for readers to view, change and execute the code behind figures in selected papers published on eLife.
Stencila was funded by eLife and supported by eLife Technology until they moved to the Astera Institute’s Open Science Programme. The team have continued to provide mentorship and partnership opportunities while using parts of the Stencila code stack to support Reviewed Preprints on eLife and in Kotahi.
DocMaps
A community-endorsed framework for capturing valuable context about the processes used to create documents in a machine-readable way
eLife played a pivotal role in the development and implementation of DocMaps. Through an informal working group we created a pilot focused on using DocMaps to exchange community preprint evaluations between Sciety, EMBO’s Early Evidence Base, bioRxiv, and medRxiv.
By 2022, this effort evolved into the DocMaps Implementation Group, which is expanding partnerships, developing integrations, creating toolkits, and designing a robust governance model. Today, DocMaps works with COAR Notify to facilitate the open and interoperable exchange of peer review and assessment information between services like Sciety and EuropePMC. It also underpins the computer-readable description of eLife’s own peer review and assessment process, enabling the rendering of Reviewed Preprints for both eLife and Kotahi.
Libero
Extending eLife’s technology for reuse by others with a powerful suite covering submission, peer review, production and publication
Building on the success of Continuum and our collaboration with the Coko Foundation we set out on an ambitious project to convert the expertise, technology and related-assets into a full suite of publishing tools designed specifically with reuse by others.
The result was Libero Publisher (a hosting platform that later seeded the ideas behind eLife the Journal Reviewed Preprint platform), Libero Reviewer (that was the beginnings of Kotahi) and Libero Editor (which became inspiration for the production tools in Kotahi whilst remaining a stand alone product).
Hypothes.is Publisher Groups
Using open standards to facilitate open discourse directly on published content for eLife and beyond
We worked closely with Hypothesis to expand its original platform into a more versatile annotation experience that can be integrated seamlessly into publishers’ websites. The implementation of this on eLife’s website enables users to make public or private annotations on published content.
The publisher group functionality became part of the core offering for Hypothesis enabling other publishers to offer a similar experience to eLife and help annotate the web promoting discourse around scientific publications.
Continuum Publishing Platform
Continuous publication of journal articles from JATS XML
Continuum was the precursor to the platform that powers eLife’s journal today and was the first open platform eLife used to start an independent publishing operation that allowed the level of innovation needed to explore the boundaries of new publishing models.
Features that focused on excellent user experience, usability and accessibility sparked interest from the wider publishing community. Parts of the platform still power eLife today and have enabled others like the Journal of Microsimulation to publish their content in a modern way.
eLife Lens
Providing a novel way of looking at content on the web. It is designed to make life easier for researchers, reviewers, authors and readers
The eLife Lens project was the first and most reused open source software produced at eLife. As part of a collaboration with UC Berkeley graduate student Ivan Grubisic and the team at Substance, the javascript-based, embeddable tool has been used to show two types of content in panels in a number of different use cases.
The best known use case is as the “side-by-side” view for eLife’s research articles, allowing readers to view figures while reading the narrative, or inspecting references without losing their place in the paper.
