What Kotahi is
Kotahi is an open-source platform for submission and peer review. It is built for the publishing models that do not fit traditional submission systems: Publish-Review-Curate (PRC), preprint review, overlay journals, Diamond Open Access, and community-run review of research objects that are not papers at all.
It is stewarded by eLife Pathways, part of eLife.
What you can do with it
Section titled “What you can do with it”Run a submission and review workflow you designed yourself. Submission forms, reviewer forms and decision forms are all configurable without writing code. You decide what data to collect, who sees it, and what happens next.
Ingest preprints automatically. Kotahi can pull metadata from preprint servers, so a triage-and-review workflow does not have to start with manual data entry.
Publish where you need to. Kotahi produces the formats and endpoints publishing actually requires, including DOI registration and typeset PDFs, and interoperates with the wider open infrastructure ecosystem.
Manage the public-facing side too. The CMS layer — now being developed as BATS CMS — lets you run the website that presents your published content, rather than bolting a separate system onto the review engine.
What it costs
Section titled “What it costs”Kotahi is open source. There are no licence fees, and no lock-in: you can take the software and your content elsewhere whenever you want.
What does cost money is someone running it. If you want eLife Pathways to host, configure or support your instance, see Service and support.
Why it exists
Section titled “Why it exists”Most submission systems are built for one publishing model — a journal with issues, an editor, and an accept-or-reject decision — and everything else is a workaround. Communities experimenting with review and curation kept hitting the same wall: the software would not bend, and the vendors had no reason to make it.
Kotahi’s premise is that the workflow should be a configuration, not a development project, and that the software running scholarly communication should be inspectable and owned by the community that depends on it.
Where Kotahi came from
Section titled “Where Kotahi came from”Kotahi was originally built by Coko with a community of publishers and researchers. eLife Pathways now stewards its development and maintenance, and provides the services around it.