''eLife'' is a 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 The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...

, following a workshop held in 2010 at the

Janelia Farm Research Campus Janelia Research Campus is a scientific research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that opened in October 2006. The campus is located in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the town of Ashburn. It is known for its scientific research and ...

. Together, these organizations provided the initial funding to support the business and publishing operations. In 2016, the organizations committed US$26 million to continue publication of the journal. The current

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...

Michael Eisen Michael Bruce Eisen (born April 13, 1967) is an American computational biologist and the 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 o ...

(

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

). 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 Human genetics is the study of inheritance as it occurs in human beings. Human genetics encompasses a variety of overlapping fields including: classical genetics, cytogenetics, molecular genetics, biochemical genetics, genomics, population gene ...

and

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...

biophysics Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. ...

epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evide ...

, and

ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overl ...

Business model

''eLife'' is a

non-profit organisation A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

, but for long-term sustainability of the service, the journal asks for an

article processing charge An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal ...

of US$3,000 for papers accepted for publication. This charge was reduced to US$2,000 in 2022 after the adoption of a new model without accept/reject decisions. Authors with insufficient funding are eligible for a fee waiver.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in

Medline MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...

BIOSIS Previews BIOSIS Previews is an English-language, bibliographic database service, with abstracts and citation indexing. It is part of '' Clarivate Analytics Web of Science'' suite. BIOSIS Previews indexes data from 1926 to the present. BIOSIS Previews ...

Chemical Abstracts Service CAS (formerly Chemical Abstracts Service) is a division of the American Chemical Society. It is a source of chemical information. CAS is located in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Print periodicals ''Chemical Abstracts'' is a periodical index t ...

, Science Citation Index Expanded, and

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collec ...

'', the journal has a 2018

impact factor 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 ...

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 Robert Tjian (; born 1949) is a Hong Kong-born American biochemist best known for his work on eukaryotic transcription. He is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator ...

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 The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

consultant virologist Chris Smith of ''

The Naked Scientists ''The Naked Scientists'' is a one-hour audience-interactive science radio talk show broadcast live by the BBC in the East of England, nationally by BBC Radio 5 Live and internationally on ABC Radio National, Australia; it is also distributed g ...

''.

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 Medium may refer to: Science and technology Aviation *Medium bomber, a class of war plane *Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Communication * Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data * Medium of ...

. 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 Randy Wayne Schekman (born December 30, 1948) 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 ...

(the first editor-in-chief) criticized ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

'', ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

'' and ''

Cell Cell most often refers to: * Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life Cell may also refer to: Locations * Monastic cell, a small room, hut, or cave in which a religious recluse lives, alternatively the small precursor of a monastery ...

'' 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. 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%. 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. 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. 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." All papers invited for the peer-review will be published on the ''eLife'' website as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by an ''eLife'' assessment and public reviews.

Other partners

In April 2017, ''eLife'' was one of the founding partners in the

Initiative for Open Citations The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017, that describes itself as: "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of ...

References

External links

*
eLife digests on Medium

eLife Insightsdigests
an
podcast
{{Wellcome Trust English-language journals Biology journals Open access journals Publications established in 2012 General medical journals Max Planck Society Wellcome Trust Continuous journals