ELife


eLife is a prestigious, not for profit peer-reviewed open access scientific journal for the biomedical and life sciences. It was established at the end of 2012 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust, following a workshop held in 2010 at the Janelia Farm Research Campus. Together, these organizations provided the initial funding to support the business and publishing operations. In 2016, the organizations committed USD$26 million to continue publication of the journal.
The current editor-in-chief is Michael Eisen. Editorial decisions are made largely by senior editors and members of the board of reviewing editors, all of whom are active scientists working in fields ranging from human genetics and neuroscience to biophysics and epidemiology.

Business model

The journal asks for an article processing charge of USD$2,500 for papers accepted for publication. Authors with insufficient funding to pay the fee are eligible for a fee waiver.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Medline, BIOSIS Previews, Chemical Abstracts Service, Science Citation Index Expanded, and Scopus.
According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2018 impact factor of 7.080. The journal opposes the over-reliance on the impact factor by the scientific community. In an 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."

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 aimed at a lay audience. Since December 2014, the journal has been sharing a selection of the digests on the blog publishing platform Medium. 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.

Trying innovative rules of review

Schekman 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 peer review process, eLife encourages the reviewers to discuss a manuscript and agree on a common recommendation. However, the acceptance rate of eLife was 15.4% in 2015, which is similar to the acceptance rates of Nature and Science - both below 10%.
During peer review process, eLife encourages the reviewers to discuss a manuscript and agree on a common recommendation.
In June 2018, eLife announced that it would try innovative peer review model 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.

Other partners

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