eLife biorxiv review works in reverse order to a conventional journal: the paper is posted publicly on bioRxiv first, and eLife’s editors and reviewers evaluate it only after it is already visible to the world, publishing the result as a “Reviewed Preprint” rather than issuing an accept-or-reject verdict.
A Reviewed Preprint is a bioRxiv or medRxiv manuscript that has been through eLife’s editorial and peer-review process and is published, alongside public reviews and an eLife Assessment, without a binary publication decision attached to it.
- What is eLife’s preprint-only review model?
- How does eLife review a preprint already on bioRxiv?
- How does this differ from traditional pre-publication peer review?
- Where does bioRxiv fit among preprint servers?
- What does this mean for research administrators and institutions?
- Common questions about eLife and bioRxiv
What Is eLife’s Preprint-Only Review Model?
eLife requires every submission to already exist as a preprint, typically on bioRxiv or medRxiv, before its editors will consider it. Editors — themselves active researchers — screen incoming preprints and select a subset for full review. In 2023, eLife formalised this into its Publish, Review, Curate model, removing the accept/reject gate entirely: any preprint that goes through full review is published as a Reviewed Preprint, regardless of how favourable the assessment turns out to be.
This inverts the journal’s traditional role. Instead of deciding whether a paper reaches readers, eLife’s reviewers now decide how a paper readers can already see should be interpreted, through a public review and a standardised eLife Assessment describing the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence.
How Does eLife Review a Preprint Already on bioRxiv?
The workflow eLife uses is consultative rather than adversarial, and it produces a single, consolidated verdict rather than several disconnected reviewer reports. In practice it runs through six stages:
- The author posts the manuscript to bioRxiv or medRxiv as a preprint.
- The author submits the same preprint to eLife for consideration.
- A reviewing editor screens the preprint and decides whether to send it for full review; many submissions are declined at this stage.
- Two or three external reviewers and the editor hold a consultative discussion to produce one consolidated set of comments rather than separate, sometimes-conflicting reports, with authorship and contribution details carried over from the original preprint.
- eLife publishes the preprint together with the public reviews and an eLife Assessment as a Reviewed Preprint.
- The author chooses whether, and when, to revise the work, resubmit it for further review, or declare it a Version of Record.
This builds on a service eLife had already run since May 2020, when it launched “Preprint Review” to bring peer review to manuscripts already on bioRxiv, and on a submission pathway available since 2017 that let authors upload to bioRxiv while submitting to eLife in parallel.
How Does This Differ From Traditional Pre-Publication Peer Review?
The core difference is sequencing: in a conventional journal, review happens before the public ever sees the manuscript, and the outcome of that review is a gatekeeping decision. In eLife’s model, the manuscript is already public, and review adds an evaluative layer on top of it rather than deciding whether it exists at all.
| Feature | eLife’s model | Traditional pre-publication review |
|---|---|---|
| Timing | Publish first, review second | Review first, publish only if accepted |
| Outcome | No accept/reject; all reviewed work is published as a Reviewed Preprint | Binary accept/reject decision |
| Transparency | Reviews and eLife Assessment published openly | Reviewer identities and comments usually confidential |
| Author control | Author decides when to revise or declare a Version of Record | Author must satisfy editor/reviewers to be published at all |
| Unit of evaluation | Article-level assessment | Journal-level acceptance, often read as a proxy for quality |
The trade-off is real, not just structural. Because Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor methodology requires an indexed journal to publish only papers that editors have formally validated as acceptable, eLife’s decision to publish every reviewed preprint — regardless of the assessment’s verdict — led Clarivate to discontinue eLife’s Journal Impact Factor from its 2025 Journal Citation Reports release, ending a metric that had stood at 6.4.
Where Does bioRxiv Fit Among Preprint Servers?
bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) is a free preprint server for the life sciences, operated by openRxiv, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing scientific communication. It sits within a wider ecosystem of subject-specific preprint servers, several of which are frequently confused with one another or with journal-run review platforms such as Research Square’s In Review.
| Server | Field | Screening model |
|---|---|---|
| bioRxiv | Life sciences | Basic screening only; operated by nonprofit openRxiv |
| medRxiv | Health sciences / clinical | Additional screening for clinical risk; also run by openRxiv |
| arXiv | Physics, maths, computer science | Moderated but not peer-reviewed; run by Cornell University |
| Research Square | Multidisciplinary | Preprint posting plus optional “In Review” integrated peer review, tied to Springer Nature journals |
| SSRN | Social sciences, economics, law | Basic screening; owned by Elsevier |
| ChemRxiv | Chemistry | Basic screening; run by chemical societies |
The distinction that matters for the “biorxiv or arxiv” question is disciplinary scope, not rigour: arXiv predates bioRxiv by more than two decades and serves physical sciences, while bioRxiv (launched 2013) was purpose-built for biology. Neither performs peer review itself — that is precisely the gap eLife’s model was designed to fill for bioRxiv content.
What Does This Mean for Research Administrators and Institutions?
For research administration offices, the practical question is no longer whether a preprint has been reviewed, but whether assessment, promotion, and funding-reporting processes recognise a Reviewed Preprint as equivalent to a conventional accepted article. That question is not yet uniformly answered.
- The US National Institutes of Health has permitted preprints to be cited in grant applications and biosketches since 2017, establishing precedent that funders can recognise unpublished-but-posted work.
- eLife reports that a growing number of funders now explicitly recognise Reviewed Preprints, rather than only the eventual Version of Record, in research assessment.
- Institutions signed to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) already commit to evaluating research on its own merits rather than journal-level metrics — directly compatible with article-level eLife Assessments, since Clarivate no longer supplies a journal Impact Factor to fall back on.
- Research administrators handling REF-style exercises, tenure dossiers, or grant reports need local guidance on whether the Reviewed Preprint, the eLife Assessment, or the Version of Record is the citable unit — under the 2023 model, all three can exist for one piece of work, each with its own DOI in a single version log.
A data point often missing from commentary on the model: a 2019 eLife study by Abdill and Blekhman tracking bioRxiv preprint outcomes found eLife published almost as many bioRxiv preprints (394) in 2018 as any other single journal — over a third of its 1,172 articles that year — years before the 2023 model made this the default route.
Common Questions About eLife and bioRxiv
Is eLife a preprint?
No. eLife is a journal, not a preprint server. It reviews manuscripts that authors have already posted as preprints on bioRxiv or medRxiv and publishes the result as a Reviewed Preprint — the preprint plus public reviews and an eLife Assessment, distinct from the original unreviewed posting.
What is bioRxiv used for?
bioRxiv is used to share life-sciences research immediately, before or independent of journal peer review. Researchers post manuscripts to establish priority, gather early feedback, and make findings available while formal review — at eLife or elsewhere — is still under way, sometimes for months.
Why did eLife lose its impact factor?
Clarivate discontinued eLife’s Journal Impact Factor because eLife now publishes every peer-reviewed submission as a Reviewed Preprint regardless of the review outcome, rather than issuing conventional accept/reject decisions. Clarivate’s indexing rules require journals to publish only editorially validated papers, so eLife’s model fell outside that requirement from the 2025 Journal Citation Reports release.
Is eLife a high-impact journal?
eLife’s citation performance was historically strong — its last Journal Impact Factor was 6.4 — but it no longer carries a Clarivate-assigned Impact Factor. Its standing is now judged through article-level eLife Assessments and public reviews rather than a single journal-wide citation metric.
As more funders and institutions formalise how they treat Reviewed Preprints, Public Reviews, and eLife Assessments in research assessment, eLife’s model looks less like an isolated experiment and more like an early test case for peer review as a layer added on top of open preprints, rather than a gate placed in front of them. Research offices that decide this now — before it becomes a routine dossier question — will have a real advantage over those that wait for a funder mandate to force the issue.