Now before we go any further, it's important to note that eLife is not a predatory journal—you know, the journals that publish anything, even nonsense papers about “weird” birds and “the educational value of high school students driving into the desert and making drugs.”

There is no accept/reject decision after peer review: rather, every article we review is published on the eLife website as a Reviewed Preprint. This is a new type of integrated publication that includes the article, an eLife assessment, public reviews, and a response from the authors (if available).

On January 31 2023, we launched our new model for publishing, combining the speed and transparency of preprints with the expert scrutiny and evaluation of peer review. We committed to publish everything that we reviewed. We would publish preprints together with public reviews and assessments.

By the end of the trial process, we ended up with an acceptance rate of 22% for early-career researchers (compared with 14% in the regular process), 19% for mid-career researchers (compared with 18% in the regular process), and 32% for late-career last authors (compared with 20.5% in the regular process).