eLife's original publishing model

In January 2023, eLife changed its approach to peer review. The journal’s original approach to peer review and publication is described below.

An author made an Initial Submission. This was considered by a Senior Editor, who usually consulted one or more Reviewing Editors.

If this Initial Submission was considered to be a potentially important contribution, it was assigned to a Reviewing Editor and the authors were asked to make a Full Submission that would be peer reviewed.

The Reviewing Editor selected peer reviewers and oversaw the peer-review process. Once the last review had been received, the editors and reviewers discussed the manuscript and the reviews. 

The aim of this consultation was to decide if the manuscript, after revision, had the potential to reach the standards required for publication in eLife.

If the decision was favourable, the authors received a decision letter listing the points that needed to be addressed in a revised manuscript: authors were not sent the reviewer reports and did not, therefore, have to respond to redundant or conflicting comments from reviewers. Moreover, authors were only invited to submit a revised manuscript if it was felt that the revision process could be completed in a few months.

If the editor and reviewers found that the work in the manuscript was too limited or technically too weak to be revised without major additional work, the manuscript was rejected. 

In general the revised manuscript was only considered by the editor, who decided if it could be accepted or if further revisions were required.

The published version of the article included the most substantive revision requests from the decision letter and the accompanying author responses.