image: Logo for Lifecycle Journal
Credit: Center for Open Science
(Charlottesville, VA, Jan. 30, 2025) – The Center for Open Science (COS) is excited to announce that Lifecycle Journal, a 3-year research and development pilot on a new model of scholarly communication, is now open for submissions. Lifecycle Journal reimagines scholarly publishing in line with scholarly values of rigor, transparency, sharing, correction, and community evaluation. Lifecycle Journal offers a dynamic, community-driven approach to scholarly publishing, providing a new experience for authors, reviewers, and readers to critically engage with research throughout the entire research lifecycle.
The traditional publishing model often limits the role of the research community in shaping how scholarship is shared and evaluated. Lifecycle Journal shifts that paradigm, putting the scholarly community in control of the publishing process. The journal fosters a community of practice for innovators and evaluators to explore, test, and improve new methods of assessment. By building a collection of human-led, machine-assisted, and empirical credibility evaluations, Lifecycle Journal empowers researchers to:
- Share all aspects of their research
- Publish outputs throughout the research lifecycle
- Receive feedback from community-led evaluation services
- Update their research with revisions, progress, and new outputs
- Engage the community on the meaning, impact, and next steps of their work
- Be rewarded based on diverse, meaningful assessments of their research quality
“Lifecycle Journal aims to reimagine scholarly publishing by creating a model where transparency, collaboration, and community-driven evaluation are at the forefront,” said Brian Nosek, Executive Director of COS. “By enabling researchers to share and refine their work throughout the entire research lifecycle, it addresses critical challenges in trust, rigor, and accountability.”
Traditional publishing practices often create barriers to transparency and collaboration, limiting opportunities for sharing intermediary findings or engaging in self-correction. Lifecycle Journal addresses these challenges by providing a network of evaluation services that go beyond traditional peer review, including human-led assessments, machine-learning tools, and empirical evaluations. These services enhance transparency, improve research quality, and empower researchers to showcase the value and impact of their work through community-driven feedback and credibility assessments.
Lifecycle Journal represents a step toward addressing systemic challenges in scholarly publishing. By aligning the rewards of publishing with transparency, rigor, and quality, the journal provides a framework that is both innovative and responsive to the evolving needs of the research community.
“There are well-acknowledged problems with current publishing practices, such as placing those with potential conflicts in gatekeeping roles and failing to address reproducibility across laboratories,” said Christopher Moore, Professor of Neuroscience and Associate Director of the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University, and Lifecycle Journal Editorial Advisor. “Lifecycle Journal provides direct remedies to these challenges by aligning rewards with quality, ensuring transparency, and embracing a learn-by-doing approach that meets the diverse needs of the research community.”
This pilot embraces innovation and metascience from the outset, incorporating machine and human evaluations to foster continuous improvement and accountability. COS is committed to sharing successes and challenges openly, enabling the broader research community to build upon these experiences.
For more information, visit: www.lifecyclejournal.org
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About the Center for Open Science
Founded in 2013, COS is a nonprofit culture change organization with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools, including the Open Science Framework (OSF). Learn more at cos.io.