The future of publishing models and academic incentives

How can scholarly communication move “beyond the article”?

On February 3-4, 2025, PLOS brought together institutional leaders, and open science organizations as part of its Redefining Publishing initiative. The goals of the meeting were to explore how open science publishing models intersect with research incentives, particularly funding and assessment structures to support open research practices.

Why move “beyond the article”?

The current research evaluation system limits recognition to a narrow range of outputs – primarily peer-reviewed articles. Participants expressed the need for recognition at every stage of the research process as current incentives discourage risk-taking and community-oriented practices such as mentorship.

Recognition beyond the article will:

Support change in research evaluation, building public trust in science and demonstrating impact.
Ensure credit for all research contributions, including non-significant results, data, and code.
Acknowledge contributions beyond research outputs, such as mentorship.
Leverage technological advances, such as AI, large datasets and repositories, and metadata tools.
Ensure compliance with open science mandates and funder policies.
Fuel innovation and competitiveness within the research community.

What we’ve learned from related initiatives:

Most initiatives relevant to open science and research assessment are currently in their infancy.

Barriers to success include:

Cost, such as for curation of research outputs and scaling up activities.

Establishing alternative proxies for quality and trustworthiness.

Variations across institutions, disciplines, and regions.

Feedback on the knowledge stack concept:
a new model of research sharing and evaluation

PLOS’ knowledge stack concept aims to recognize a broader spectrum of research contributions while preserving existing publishing workflows. Priority elements identified for the knowledge stack model include research data; code; research plans; protocols; and resources.

What can the knowledge stack deliver?

A “complete record of the research” to help researchers showcase their contributions and enable funders, institutions, and reviewers to better assess research. However, challenges managing multiple outputs have been raised.

Improved recognition for early-career researchers and underrepresented communities, improving collaboration and building trust in science by increasing transparency.

Barriers the knowledge stack would need to overcome:

Failure to change the research evaluation process (institutions continue to rely on outdated metrics).
Concerns around increased workload due to the curation of additional outputs.
Restricting researcher mobility.
Decrease in trust and sharing of science (due to geopolitical influence).
Trust in the quality of work produced, as peer review is not expected for non-article outputs, alternative trust signals are needed.

Next steps

Further stakeholder engagement is essential to ensure the knowledge stack is scalable and adopted beyond PLOS. We will conduct validation research to test the feasibility of the knowledge stack. We'll update with more information in the next few weeks.