What is the Longevist? An overlay journal to select the most impactful longevity research every quarter. The name is supposed to evoke a similar magazine, The Economist.

Where do the articles come from? Articles will be sourced from preprint servers such as BioRxiv, MedRxiv, and Arxiv.

Who chooses the articles that the Longevist publishes? A quorum of key opinion leaders (KOL) in the longevity space. We are aiming to have a mix of industry and academic KOLs. Recognizing that KOLs are busy, they can have teams that make recommendations to them and vote on their behalf. Also, ideally ahead of a work being published on The Longevist, it would be independently peer reviewed in a public format such as on TLDR.

How does the curation work? We are aiming to recruit ~50 KOLs who will vote on the top 3-5 articles each quarter (4 times a year, March 31, June 30, September 30, December 31). Ideally, the Longevist would publish 10-20 articles a year. Having a small number should ensure that the Longevist focuses on truly impactful research. The KOLs can nominate articles to be voted on. The voting will be done on-chain. A majority 10 “yes” votes are needed to reach consensus. Once an article is accepted it will also be put on-chain. Some of the mechanics are TBD. The infrastructure for doing the voting on-chain and putting the articles on-chain will be provided by Snapshot and DeSciLabs, respectively.

What does on-chain mean? We do put the articles on blockchain storage for their permanence and provenance. Blockchains are significantly more robust for information permanence than a centralized database.

Will publishing on The Longevist affect an article’s ability to be published in a traditional journal? No - The Longevist is not a publisher. We are not modifying the content from the original preprint. We are simply curating what we hope to be the best preprints to help the field focus on impactful research.

Who leads the Longevist? Tim Peterson, VitaDAO Steward, Asst. Prof @ WashU, BIOIO founder. Rhys Anderson. VitaDAO Contributor, Postdoctoral Researcher @ Kings College London.

How do I get involved? If you or someone you know wants to vote on what gets published, please connect to tim@vitadao.com and rhys@vitadao.com. Similarly, if you want to help build The Longevist, please reach out to Tim and Rhys. USD and $VITA tokens are available to those who contribute. 500 $VITA are tentative amounts for voting each quarter. Bounties will be paid to those KOLs who recommend a preprint that gets voted on. Full and part-time positions are available for builders.