ELife

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Business model

eLife is a non-profit organisation, but for long-term sustainability of the service, the journal asks for an article processing charge of US$3,000 for papers accepted for publication. [9] This charge was reduced to US$2,000 in 2022 after the adoption of a new model without accept or reject decisions. [10] Authors with insufficient funding are eligible for a fee waiver.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Medline, BIOSIS Previews, [11] Chemical Abstracts Service, [12] Science Citation Index Expanded, [11] and Scopus. [13] According to the Journal Citation Reports , the journal has a 2023 impact factor of 6.4. [14] The journal opposes the over-reliance on the impact factor by the scientific community. [15] In October 2024, Web of Science has put its indexation of eLife in Science Citation Index Expanded on hold, citing the journal's recently-adopted publishing model as a reason for the suspension. [16]

In a 2015 interview, Howard Hughes Medical Institute then-President Robert Tjian reflected on eLife and noted, "The other big thing is, we want to kill the journal impact factor. We tried to prevent people who do the impact factors from giving us one. They gave us one anyway a year earlier than they should have. Don't ask me what it is because I truly don't want to know and don't care." [17]

eLife Podcast

The eLife Podcast is produced by BBC Radio presenter and University of Cambridge consultant virologist Chris Smith of The Naked Scientists .

eLife digests

Most research articles published in the journal include an "eLife digest", a non-technical summary of the research findings designed for a general audience. Since December 2014, the journal has been sharing a selection of the digests on the blog publishing platform Medium. [18] eLife also publishes commentary articles called "Insights", which are also written in plainer terms than the research article, but focus more on the context of the research.

Reviewing process

Randy Schekman (the first editor-in-chief [19] ) criticized Nature , Science and Cell as "luxury journals" in 2013, comparing their low acceptance levels and high impact factors with high-end "fashion designers" who deliberately inflated demand for their brand due to scarcity. During the peer review process, eLife encourages the reviewers to discuss a manuscript and agree on a common recommendation. [20] At the time, the acceptance rate of eLife was 15.4% (2015). [20]

In June 2018, eLife announced that it would try an innovative peer review model (for some 300 submissions) where the editorial decision to send a manuscript out for review is tantamount to offering publication to that manuscript, thereby putting the authors in control of publication after editorial screening has been passed. [21]

In December 2020, eLife announced a new "publish, then review" model of publishing; from July 2021 the journal will only review manuscripts already available as preprints. [22]

On October 20, 2022, eLife announced, "From next year, eLife is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review, instead focusing on public reviews and assessments of preprints." [23] [24] All papers invited for peer-review will be published on the eLife website as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by an eLife assessment and public reviews. [23]

Ben Barres Spotlight Award

The Ben Barres Spotlight Awards, established by eLife, embody a prestigious recognition that lauds exceptional scientific accomplishments within the fields of biology and medicine, particularly highlighting contributions from historically marginalized spheres. This distinguished award not only spotlights researchers operating within resource-limited domains but also extends its scope to encompass neurodivergent trailblazers, signifying a pioneering stride towards all-encompassing inclusivity. [25] Honoring the legacy of the visionary American neurobiologist Ben Barres, a transgender scientist and impassioned advocate for scientific parity, these awards carry profound significance. Barres, a revered member of eLife's Board of Reviewing Editors, left an enduring imprint that continues to resonate.

The Ben Barres Spotlight Awards have been given each year since 2019. To qualify, applicants must be active researchers engaged in the life or biomedical sciences at a university or another non-commercial research institute. Scientists at all career stages are invited to partake in this esteemed acknowledgment. Since the establishment of the prize, award recipients have astutely harnessed the provided resources to transcend scientific barriers, seize novel research avenues, and catalyze transformative trajectories in their scientific ventures, thus etching an indelible mark on the scientific tapestry.

Controversial decisions

Following the Oct 20, 2022 announcement of the new reviewing model, some editors (including former editor-in-chief Randy Schekman) complained that the transition to the new model was too fast, and asked for compromise, threatening to resign if their concerns were not met. [26] Other editors expressed support for the new model, and suggested that the complaints came from a small minority. [27]

On October 23, 2023, eLife removed then editor-in-chief Michael Eisen for tweeting a story by The Onion with the headline: "Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas." Eisen said "The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university". [28] At least five of eLife's editors resigned and other scientists said they would stop participating in eLife events in solidarity with Eisen. A petition letter was organised to protest against Eisen’s firing. The petition, which was signed by over 2,000 scientists, academics and researchers, said eLife 's action is having a "chilling effect" on freedom of expression in academia. [6]

Other partners

In April 2017, eLife was one of the founding partners in the Initiative for Open Citations. [29]

See also

Related Research Articles

arXiv Online archive of e-preprints

arXiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, had hit a million by the end of 2014 and two million by the end of 2021. As of April 2021, the submission rate is about 16,000 articles per month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

<i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America</i> Academic journal of the National Academy of Sciences

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, published since 1915, and publishes original research, scientific reviews, commentaries, and letters. According to Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2022 impact factor of 9.4. PNAS is the second most cited scientific journal, with more than 1.9 million cumulative citations from 2008 to 2018. In the past, PNAS has been described variously as "prestigious", "sedate", "renowned" and "high impact".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright, which regulates post-publication uses of the work.

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Randy Schekman</span> American cell biologist

Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Eisen</span> American computational biologist and journal editor

Michael Bruce Eisen is an American computational biologist and the former editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He is a professor of genetics, genomics and development at University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading advocate of open access scientific publishing and is co-founder of Public Library of Science (PLOS). In 2018, Eisen announced his candidacy U.S. Senate from California as an Independent, though he failed to qualify for the ballot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open science</span> Generally available scientific research

Open science is the movement to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.

<i>PLOS One</i> Peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal

PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Berger (paleoanthropologist)</span> Paleoanthropologist, physical anthropologist, archaeologist

Lee Rogers Berger is an American-born South African paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. He is best known for his discovery of the Australopithecus sediba type site, Malapa; his leadership of Rising Star Expedition in the excavation of Homo naledi at Rising Star Cave; and the Taung Bird of Prey Hypothesis.

Nature Precedings was an open access electronic preprint repository of scholarly work in the fields of biomedical sciences, chemistry, and earth sciences. It ceased accepting new submissions as of April 3, 2012.

<i>Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology</i> Academic journal

The Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Annual Reviews since 1985. It releases an annual volume of review articles relevant to the fields of cell biology and developmental biology. Its editor has been Ruth Lehmann since 2018. As of 2024, its impact factor is 11.4. As of 2023, Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology is being published as open access, under the Subscribe to Open model.

Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:

  1. Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity.
  2. Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.
  3. Open participation: The wider community are able to contribute to the review process.

ZooKeys is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering zoological taxonomy, phylogeny, and biogeography. It was established in 2008 and the founding editor-in-chief was Terry Erwin until his death in 2020. In December 2023, Torsten Dikow was appointed the new editor-in-chief. It is published by Pensoft Publishers.

<i>Nature Communications</i> Scientific journal

Nature Communications is a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio since 2010. It is a multidisciplinary journal that covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medicine, and biology. The journal has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

Scholarly peer review or academic peer review is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed by experts in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.

<i>PeerJ</i> Academic journal

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bioRxiv Preprint service

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Jessica Polka is a biochemist and the Executive Director of ASAPbio, a non-profit initiative promoting innovation and transparency via preprints and open peer review. She was one of the organizers of a recent meeting they held on scholarly communication.

References

  1. ↑ "About". eLife.
  2. ↑ McGrath, Matt (10 April 2012), Trust pushes for open access to research, BBC
  3. ↑ Callaway, Ewen (2016-06-02). "Open-access journal eLife gets £25-million boost". Nature . 534 (7605): 14–15. Bibcode:2016Natur.534...14C. doi: 10.1038/534014a . PMID   27251251.
  4. ↑ "eLife welcomes Michael Eisen as Editor-in-Chief". eLife. 2019-03-05. Retrieved 2019-03-05.
  5. ↑ Boardman-Pretty, Freya (5 November 2011), "Open-access science journal leaves editing to the experts", Times Higher Education
  6. 1 2 "Firing of science journal editor after Gaza post sparks free speech rift". NBC News. 2023-10-26. Retrieved 2023-11-01.
  7. ↑ "Statement of the eLife Board of Directors". Inside eLife. eLife. 24 October 2023. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
  8. ↑ "Communicating the latest advances in life science and biomedicine", eLife, retrieved 6 October 2015
  9. ↑ "Inside eLife: Setting a fee for publication". 2016-09-29. Retrieved 2016-09-29.
  10. ↑ Else, Holly (2022-11-03). "eLife won't reject papers once they are under review — what researchers think". Nature. Springer Science and Business Media LLC. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-03534-6. ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   36329143. S2CID   253302170.
  11. 1 2 "Master Journal List". Intellectual Property & Science. Thomson Reuters. Archived from the original on 2017-09-26. Retrieved 2016-10-10.
  12. ↑ "CAS Source Index". Chemical Abstracts Service . American Chemical Society. Archived from the original on 2010-02-11. Retrieved 2016-10-10.
  13. ↑ "Content overview". Scopus. Elsevier . Retrieved 2016-10-10.
  14. ↑ "eLife". 2023 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Science ed.). Thomson Reuters. 2024.
  15. ↑ "Communicating the latest advances in life science and biomedicine", eLife, retrieved 26 October 2015
  16. ↑ Brainard, Jeffrey (October 24, 2024). "Web of Science index puts eLife 'on hold' because of its radical publishing model". Science . Retrieved November 1, 2024.
  17. ↑ "Q&A: Outgoing HHMI chief reflects on leading $19 billion biomedical charity". 2015-08-07.
  18. ↑ eLife is now on Medium, 2014-12-18, retrieved 2 March 2015
  19. ↑ Grens, Kerry (Aug 19, 2018), Randy Schekman to Leave eLife, The Scientist
  20. 1 2 Callaway, Ewen (June 2, 2016). "Open-access journal eLife gets £25-million boost". Nature News. 534 (7605): 14–15. Bibcode:2016Natur.534...14C. doi: 10.1038/534014a . PMID   27251251.
  21. ↑ Patterson, M.; Schekman, R. (2018). "Scientific Publishing: A new twist on peer review". eLife. 7. doi: 10.7554/eLife.36545 . PMC   6019064 . PMID   29944117.
  22. ↑ Eisen, Michael B; Akhmanova, Anna; Behrens, Timothy E; Harper, Diane M; Weigel, Detlef; Zaidi, Mone (December 1, 2020). "Implementing a "publish, then review" model of publishing". eLife. 9: e64910. doi: 10.7554/eLife.64910 . PMC   7710353 . PMID   33258772.
  23. 1 2 "eLife's New Model: Changing the way you share your research". eLife. 2022-10-20. Retrieved 2022-10-20.
  24. ↑ Eisen, Michael B; Akhmanova, Anna; Behrens, Timothy E; Diedrichsen, Jörn; Harper, Diane M; Iordanova, Mihaela D; Weigel, Detlef; Zaidi, Mone (2022-10-20). "Peer review without gatekeeping". eLife. 11: e83889. doi: 10.7554/eLife.83889 . ISSN   2050-084X. PMC   9584602 . PMID   36263932.
  25. ↑ Ben Barres Spotlight Awards, 5 July 2023, eLife
  26. ↑ Abbott, Alison (2023-03-17). "Strife at eLife: inside a journal's quest to upend science publishing". Nature. 615 (7954): 780–781. doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00831-6. PMID   36932204. S2CID   257603717 . Retrieved 2023-03-20.
  27. ↑ Urban, Lara; Mehta, Devang (2023-04-11). "eLife: community support for a new publishing model". Nature. 616 (7956). Nature Publishing Group: 249. Retrieved 2023-04-20.
  28. ↑ "Prominent journal editor fired for endorsing satirical article about Israel-Hamas conflict". Science. 2023-10-24. Retrieved 2023-10-24.
  29. ↑ "Press". Initiative for Open Citations. 6 April 2017. Retrieved 6 April 2017.
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