About the Journal

About the Journal

About the Journal

A new axis for medical scholarship.

No research is perfect.
That's why ours lives in the open.

Imperfect by design · Open by default · Governed by AI

Mission

Modern medicine no longer fits inside a single specialty — and modern science no longer fits inside 1665's editorial workflow. MedAxis is built for the AI era from the ground up: every manuscript is screened by twelve specialized AI Agents, every review is public, and every reader with an ORCID can contribute to the curation of the literature.

We don't make Accept / Reject decisions. We publish, review in public, and let the community curate. We accept imperfect work and help authors iterate it toward better — because pretending all published research is finished and flawless is precisely what produced the replication crisis.

Why MedAxis is Different

Three structural problems plague traditional peer review: sample size (2–3 reviewers can't catch fraud), opacity (no one sees the process), and human bias (network, mood, relationships). MedAxis was designed to fix all three at once.

  • Public Peer Review — All expert reviews, AI Agent reports, and editorial assessments are published alongside the article. Permanently. Citably.
  • Reader-Driven Review — ORCID-verified clinicians, researchers, and students comment under their real identity. Concerns auto-surface as banners. Three thousand watching readers catch what three reviewers cannot.
  • AI-Native Editorial — Twelve specialized AI Agents handle triage, methods, statistics, image forensics, ethics, clinical plausibility, reproducibility, literature context, and more — running in parallel within hours, not weeks.
  • Imperfect-Friendly — Working Manuscripts, null results, failed replications, and pilot studies are first-class content types — not rejected for being honest about their state.

The OPEN Editorial Workflow

  1. Submission & AI Triage (< 30 min) — Scope, ethics, and minimum methodological readiness checked by the Triage Agent.
  2. Parallel AI Audit (< 4 hours) — Methods, Statistics, Image Forensics, Ethics, Clinical Plausibility, Reproducibility, Literature Context, and Language Agents all run simultaneously. Reports are public.
  3. Editorial Decision Agent synthesizes the matrix into an explainable, rule-based decision. A human Researcher-Editor confirms.
  4. Reviewed Preprint goes live (~72 hours from submission) — paper + AI reports + editor assessment.
  5. Public Peer Review — 2–3 invited expert reviewers + AI Reviewer Agents + ORCID-verified reader comments, all visible.
  6. Iteration — Authors revise; new versions get a diff view; AI & community update their assessments.
  7. Version of Record — Authors mark the version they consider definitive. Discussion, however, never closes.

What We Publish

  • Research Articles — Complete original studies
  • Working Manuscripts ⭐ — Version-controlled drafts that evolve through community input
  • Null Result Reports ⭐ — Negative findings, equally welcomed
  • Replication Reports ⭐ — Successful, partial, or failed reproductions
  • Pilot Studies — Exploratory small-sample work, openly labeled
  • Living Reviews — Continuously updated as the field moves
  • Clinical Perspectives — 500–1500 word notes from the bedside
  • Data & Code Notes — First-class citations for open resources
  • Methodology Capsules, Editorial Dialogues, Post-publication Commentary & Retractions with Discussion

⭐ = content types MedAxis treats as first-class that most journals reject.

AI Agent Governance

All Agent rules, prompts, versions, and audit results are published openly. Authors and readers can:

  • Inspect any Agent's decision rationale on any paper
  • Appeal any Agent judgment through a public, recorded process
  • Propose rule changes via the MedAxis Agent RFC process (community-voted)

An annual Agent Governance Report publishes decision distributions, appeal outcomes, and rule-change history.

Open Access Statement

All articles published in MedAxis are immediately and permanently free to read, download, copy and distribute under a CC BY 4.0 license. Authors retain the copyright to their work. All data and code are required to be open wherever ethically permissible.

Publication Frequency

MedAxis publishes continuously: Reviewed Preprints go live within ~72 hours of submission. Articles are grouped into a numbered issue every two months (bimonthly, six per year), but individual papers do not wait for an issue to be discoverable.

Identifiers

  • ISSN (Online): 3104-5251
  • ISSN-L: 3104-5243
  • Country of publication: Hong Kong S.A.R., China
  • ISSN Center responsible: International

The MedAxis Promise

Ten things we will never compromise on.

To readers

  1. We will never hide a review, an AI Agent report, or a concern.
  2. We will never close a discussion thread on a paper, ever.
  3. We will display every concern as prominently as the paper itself.
  4. We will publish our AI Agent rules, versions, and audits openly.

To authors

  1. We will not reject your paper for being imperfect — we will help you make it less imperfect.
  2. We will not let a human editor's mood or network decide your fate. Rules will.
  3. We will give you a transparent, AI-explained decision within 72 hours.
  4. We will let you appeal any AI judgment publicly.

To science

  1. We will treat retraction as honesty, not shame.
  2. We will treat negative results, failed replications, and Working Manuscripts as first-class citizens.

Because medicine is too important to be reviewed in private,
by three reviewers, in 1665's workflow.