OxFOS 2025 - Redefining Scientific Publishing

Part of the Oxford Forum of Open Scholarship

Reimagining scholarly publishing to promote credible and trustworthy research

The purpose of scholarly publishing is to facilitate the communication and interrogation of evidence and claims to advance knowledge production. The business of scholarly publishing interferes with this purpose. Research is inhibited by a scholarly publishing system that [1] is slow, incomplete, opaque, and static, [2] treats the paper as the only meaningful scholarly output, [3] offers dysfunctional, simplistic rewards based on publication and journal status, and [4] is calcified in legacy, commercial business models and infrastructure. The Lifecycle Journal is an alternative approach to scholarly publishing intended to address these weaknesses and align the practice of scholarly publishing with its purpose.