eLife announced as this year’s OpenAthens UX Award winners for its user-driven approach to Reviewed Preprints
OpenAthens is delighted to announce eLife as the winner of its UX Award 2025 for its user-driven approach to the design of Reviewed Preprints under the eLife Model. Award organizer, Jane Charlton, declared eLife the winner today at OpenAthens’ annual online Access Lab event.
The UX Award recognizes publishers and library systems vendors that have developed the best user experience and journey to their content and services. Now in its sixth year, the award aims to inspire vendors to invest resources into good UX design and make access to knowledge as easy as possible for end users.
This year’s panel judges chose eLife as this year’s winner because they scored highly across all steps in the award process and clearly evidenced improvements to user experience. Judges were impressed with the publisher’s user research which guided the design process throughout. eLife strongly demonstrated continual iteration and improvement, and clearly focused on real outcomes and impact on users.
Two other finalists, Cambridge University Press and Frontiers Media SA were worthy contenders for this year’s award and made significant improvements to the user journey.
eLife was recognized for the user-driven design work that the team applied to its unique model for publishing. Launched in 2023, the eLife model ends the accept/reject decision after peer review and focuses instead on the public review and assessment of preprints. The outputs of the model are Reviewed Preprints that combine the advantages of preprints with the scrutiny offered by peer review.
The eLife team’s usability testing of the first Reviewed Preprints showed that many readers still assumed they were revised and “accepted” before publication, and it wasn’t easy to tell the difference between versions. The team carried out user surveys and prototype testing that helped them to improve the communication of the status and version of article pages. They also helped make the public reviews and eLife Assessments easier to find, and information about the model easier to understand. It is this work, and the clearly presented evidence of it, that has been recognized by the UX Award.
Lead UX designer at eLife, Chris Huggins, expressed his excitement at winning the award:
“We’re delighted to be named this year’s winner of the OpenAthens UX Award. eLife has always taken a user-driven approach to the design of our website and publication process. This is especially the case for the eLife Model where we’re doing something very different to other publishers.
Our team has put in a significant amount of work to ensure the process is as clear and intuitive as possible for all our stakeholders, including authors, readers and other users of the Reviewed Preprints we publish. It’s a real honor to have our efforts recognized in this way.”
Damian Pattinson, eLife Executive Director, says:
“From the start, eLife has invested in integrating good UX design into everything we do as part of our mission to improve how research is reviewed and communicated. As the eLife Model provides a completely new approach to the traditional system, it’s even more crucial to ensure our process is as simple and seamless as possible for all users to navigate.
Chris and the team have done a fantastic job in making this happen with the help of their user-driven research both during and after the launch of the model. The UX Award is a testament to the work and dedication that has gone into this so far, and I’d like to congratulate the team for this achievement.”
UX award organizer, Jane Charlton, explains the importance of the award for the industry:
“More publishers and other library vendors are investing effort into designing optimal user experiences because it can lead to increased usage, customer satisfaction and retention. Our UX Award winners are industry leaders in user-centered design, inspiring others to make improvements in this area. eLife clearly demonstrated they are taking user experience to the next level in their innovative approach to public review and assessment of preprints. We congratulate them on their achievement!”
