§ 01 · About The Meridian

A co-creating community for high-quality science

The Meridian exists to prove that scientific publishing can be rigorous, transparent, and fair, all at once. We're building a journal where reviewers are compensated as co-creators, where automation handles the labor so humans can focus on judgment, and where every step of the editorial process is visible to readers.

Why we built this

In 2026, we audited 2.5 million biomedical papers in PubMed Central and found over 4,000 fabricated references, citations that point to studies that don't exist. The fabrication rate had increased more than twelvefold in just three years. Of the 2,810 affected papers, 98.4% had received no publisher action at the time of our audit. We published these findings in The Lancet (Topaz et al., 2026).

The first recommendation in that paper: publishers should integrate automated reference verification into submission workflows before peer review begins. We looked for a journal that did this. We couldn't find one. So we built one.

The deeper problem

But fabricated references are a symptom of a larger failure. Academic publishing runs on a broken model. Large publishers earn billions while editors, reviewers, and authors contribute their expertise for free. Peer review is overwhelmed, researchers receive more review requests than they can possibly fulfill, and the quality of reviews suffers. Turnaround times stretch into months. Paper mills contaminate the literature at industrial scale, and the tools to fight them remain fragmented and underfunded.

What we're building

A journal that catches fabricated references, image manipulation, and paper mill signals before publication, not years after. A pipeline that automates what can be automated and reserves human judgment for what requires it. A publication model where peer reviews are published, citable, and credited. A community where contributing to science means being compensated for your expertise, not donating it.

§ 02 · Scope

Healthcare and biomedical sciences for now

The Meridian launches with a deliberate focus on healthcare and biomedical research. This includes clinical medicine, public health, epidemiology, health informatics, health services research, biostatistics, and translational research.

We chose this focus for three reasons: it's what our founding team knows best, it's where funder mandates for open access are strongest, and it's where the need for rigorous, fraud-resistant publishing infrastructure is most urgent.

Our ambition is broader. As The Meridian grows, we plan to expand into adjacent life sciences, STEM disciplines, and eventually social sciences and humanities, each with the same commitment to quality, transparency, and co-creation. But we believe in starting focused and expanding deliberately. Every successful open-access platform of the past decade did the same.

§ 03 · Our commitments

What we will and won't compromise on

Quality over volume: We will never scale by lowering standards. Every article published in The Meridian passes editorial judgment by a named editor.
Transparency by design: Published peer reviews. Visible revision histories. Disclosed automation practices. Transparent pricing. If we can't show it, we won't do it.
Equity in access and contribution: Open access for readers. Fee waivers for researchers who need them. Compensation for reviewers. Credit for everyone who contributes.
Technology as tool, not judge: Automation makes our pipeline faster, cheaper, and more thorough. It never makes editorial decisions. An editor reviews every manuscript. A peer reviewer evaluates every paper sent for review. Technology assists. It doesn't replace.
Integrity as infrastructure: Automated screening for plagiarism, image manipulation, reference fabrication, statistical inconsistency, and paper mill signals, not as afterthoughts, but as core pipeline components running on every submission.

§ 04 · Founders

The people building this

Laura-Maria Peltonen, PhD, RN, Docent, FIAHSI, FEANS

Co-Founder & Co-Editor-in-Chief

Associate Professor (Tenured), University of Eastern Finland
Senior Research Fellow, University of Turku
Visiting Associate Professor, University of Warwick (UK)
President-Elect, International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI)

Laura is a health informatics researcher and international science policy leader whose work bridges clinical practice, research and global governance. Trained as a registered nurse with intensive-care experience before completing her PhD at the University of Turku, she now holds a tenured professorship at the University of Eastern Finland and a Visiting Professorship at the University of Warwick (IAS, 2024). Her research focuses on the safe, sustainable use of AI in healthcare, work that connects the Lancet (2026) audit of reference fabrication in the biomedical literature, which she co-authored with Max. As President-Elect of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), Institutional Membership Officer of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) Executive Board, SPC Chair for MIE 2027 and Co-Chair for MEDINFO 2025, she sits at the center of European and global health informatics governance. She has over 150 peer-reviewed publications, €10M+ in research funding as PI or co-PI and editorial experience since 2019 including Associate Editor roles at Public Health Nursing (Wiley) and the Journal of Nursing Management. An international keynote speaker on AI and health informatics, she has led national clinical practice guideline development, recognised with a national award, and brings the international network, editorial infrastructure knowledge, and policy authority essential to building a journal that meets the standards of indexing bodies and funder mandates worldwide.

Maxim Topaz, PhD, MA, RN, FAAN, FIAHSI, FACMI

Co-Founder & Co-Editor-in-Chief

Elizabeth Standish Gill Associate Professor (Tenured), Columbia University School of Nursing
Affiliated Faculty, Data Science Institute, Columbia University
Senior Research Scientist, VNS Health

Max is a health informatician and computational researcher at Columbia University, where he holds a tenured professorship and a joint appointment with the Data Science Institute. Trained at Harvard Medical School (postdoctoral fellowship) and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, Fulbright Fellow), his research focuses on building computational systems for healthcare, from clinical decision support to the CITADEL reference integrity pipeline that audited 2.5 million biomedical papers and identified over 4,000 fabricated citations (The Lancet, 2026). He serves as President of MEDINFO, the world's largest health informatics conference, and Co-Chair of an NIH Scientific Review Section on AI. With over 200 peer-reviewed publications, $25 million in funded research including five NIH R01 grants, and recognition on Stanford University's top 2% of world-leading scientists list, he brings both the technical infrastructure expertise and the editorial experience, as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Medical Informatics and peer reviewer for The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The BMJ, and Annals of Internal Medicine, to build a journal from first principles.

Together: Laura and Max co-direct the NAIL Collaborative and co-authored the research that catalyzed The Meridian, a large-scale audit of reference fabrication in the biomedical literature. Their combined expertise spans computational systems, clinical research, health informatics, international science policy, and editorial governance. Critically, both have served as peer reviewers, associate editors, and editorial board members at major journals, they've experienced the system's failures from every seat at the table, and built The Meridian to fix it.