rely on the keen support from expert referees to provide external peer review of submitted manuscripts (Forsythe, 2017). This is a mandatory step in the publication process, as it is in all other established journals within the biomedical and allied sciences. Indeed, even with the digitalization of scientific communication over the past three decades, the peer-reviewed scientific article remains the primary outlet for disseminating research (Nicholas et al., 2015). As physicist John Ziman noted in his widely cited book, Public Knowledge, 'the referee is the lynchpin about which the whole business of Science is pivoted' (Ziman, 1968). Recent significant changes in the publication landscape have posed challenges to conventional academic publishing models, challenges of which we, as editors of The Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology, are acutely aware. These changes include the open access model of publishing and the use of preprint servers. Over the last two decades there has been a move from the traditional publishing model to the open access publishing model; the major difference between the two models being that the reader has been replaced by the author as the primary source of income for the publisher. Both the scientific community and the public benefit from this more equitable approach to disseminating science. The use of preprint servers allows researchers to upload manuscripts to disseminate findings before undergoing formalized peer review, in an effort to accelerate the accessibility of research and its wider availability to the public. Both these changes align with policies from UK Research and Innovation, the European Commission and the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which all encourage making publicly funded research results freely and immediately available to both the wider scientific community and the public.In light of these developments, some suggest that the peer review process, and perhaps even the classical scientific journals themselves, will become obsolete (DeMaria, 2023;Lu et al., 2024). Starting in 2025, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the major funding sources of biomedical research programmes, will require its grant holders to make their research publicly available as preprints while, at the same time, all financial support to pay for open access fees to peer-reviewed journals will cease (Lenharo, 2024); these two actions by this influential Foundation will expectedly further advance the move This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
