You've articulated a powerful vision that gets to the heart of the most progressive and challenging discussions happening in academic publishing today. Your perspective—that "open" should apply to the entire research lifecycle, not just the final product—is shared by many innovators who see the current system as a bottleneck rather than a facilitator of knowledge. What you are describing is a move from **Open Access** (free-to-read articles) to a truly **Open Science** framework. The gaps you've identified are precisely where the most exciting and disruptive experiments in publishing are taking place. Let's break down how your ideas align with, and push beyond, current cutting-edge models. ### 1. Open to Everyone to Submit and Review This is the "publish, then review" model, which flips the traditional "review, then publish" system on its head. * **Current Reality:** This is already happening on a massive scale with **preprint servers** like **arXiv** (for physics, math, and computer science), **bioRxiv** (for biology), and **medRxiv** (for health sciences). Researchers can post their manuscripts online for free, immediately, without prior peer review. * **Public Review:** The "review" happens in the open. Other scientists can read the preprint, comment on it publicly (on platforms like X/Twitter or dedicated comment sections), test the findings, and post their own follow-up preprints. This is a form of dynamic, community-driven peer review. It's faster and more transparent than the closed-door system. * **Your Vision:** You're advocating for this to become the primary system of record, not just a preliminary step before "real" publication. ### 2. Transparency of Every Stage & The "Living Document" The idea that a research publication should be a "living document" is one of the most transformative concepts in open science. It treats research not as a static, finished product (the PDF), but as an evolving, version-controlled hub of knowledge. * **Pioneering Platforms:** * **F1000Research** uses a model very close to what you describe. An article is published immediately. Formal, invited peer review then takes place openly, with reviewer reports and author responses published alongside the article. The article can be revised and updated, with clear versioning, creating a full, transparent history of its evolution. * **Octopus.ac** is an even more radical platform designed to break the "paper" down into its core components (Problem, Hypothesis, Method, Data, Analysis, etc.). Researchers can publish these smaller units as they complete them. This lowers the barrier to entry and creates a more direct, verifiable, and evolving chain of evidence. * **Linking Provenance:** The use of **Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)** is already expanding to support this vision. A single research effort can have linked DOIs for the preprint, the dataset, the analysis code, the peer reviews, and the final published versions, creating a transparent and interconnected web of provenance. ### 3. Accountability and Feedback Loops Your point about post-publication scrutiny and feedback is crucial. In a traditional system, a flawed paper can persist for years. In a truly open model, the feedback loop is immediate and continuous. * **Rapid Correction:** When a preprint on bioRxiv has a flaw, other scientists can point it out within days, not years. This public accountability pressures authors to be more rigorous and allows the scientific record to self-correct much faster. * **Improving Original Research:** This creates the feedback loop you mention. A published dataset can be re-analyzed by others, who might find new insights or identify errors, which then feeds back to improve the original authors' work. This makes science more collaborative and robust. ### Weaknesses and Opportunities (The Challenges) While this vision is compelling, the community is still grappling with the challenges, which represent the major opportunities for standardization: 1. **Signal vs. Noise:** If everyone can review, how do you determine which reviews are credible? How do you protect authors from bad-faith attacks or trolling? Some platforms are experimenting with "signed" reviews or reviews limited to verified experts. 2. **Credit and Incentive:** Who gets credit for a "living document"? If a paper evolves based on the feedback of ten other researchers, are they co-authors? Our current incentive system (promotions, grants) is built on rewarding the "final, published paper," and this needs to be completely rethought to reward collaboration, data sharing, and reviewing. 3. **Discovery and Filtering:** In a sea of preprints and micro-publications, how do researchers find what is truly important and trustworthy? This creates a need for new curation and reputation systems. 4. **Author Burden:** While your vision aims to reduce the burden of formatting, the burden of engaging with continuous public feedback could be immense. You are absolutely right. The current standards are a transitional phase. The "gaps" you see are the frontiers of academic publishing, and filling them is the central project of the open science movement. The future of research communication will likely look much more like the dynamic, transparent, and living ecosystem you've described.