In recent conversations with leading research funders and institutions around the world, we’ve heard that more than 100 organisations still consider eLife papers in funding and career progression opportunities, despite the loss of our Journal Impact Factor last year. We’re pleased to share more about this here.
The eLife Model for publishing made waves throughout the research community when we brought it to life in January 2023. An alternative way for researchers to publish new findings, the model eliminates accept–reject decisions after peer review and focuses instead on the public review and assessment of preprints, making the research and reviewers’ feedback more useful for authors and readers alike.
It’s been a little over two years since the launch, during which time we’ve seen a strong appetite among researchers for a faster and fairer way to publish their work, where they have more control over the fate of their publication. We've also observed that researchers value the advantages that public review and eLife Assessments offer them and their research.
Challenging the status quo within the publishing industry was never going to be easy and we’ve encountered some challenges along the way. Despite agreeing that our peer-review process continues to be robust and rigorous, Clarivate, which runs the Web of Science platform, informed us that our model was not eligible for a Journal Impact Factor. Maintaining this metric would have required significant changes to our model at the expense of key benefits for our authors, therefore we decided to stay the course rather than compromising. This meant we became partially indexed in Web of Science in December and lost our Impact Factor as a result.
What’s happened since then?
Ever since we were first placed “on hold” by Web of Science, we’ve received overwhelming support from researchers and the wider research community. eLife itself has never supported the Impact Factor as a measure of research quality. It is an overly simplistic, journal-level metric that doesn’t – and can’t – say anything about a singular piece of research. But we know the Impact Factor is still important to researchers in some settings, so we remained in close discussion with funders, partner institutions and colleagues throughout the open science community to address any concerns as we proceeded with our new indexing status.
A common concern from our network was that publishing with eLife would make researchers ineligible for consideration in funding or career progression opportunities, but whenever we investigated individual concerns, this was never found to be the case. We therefore spoke with a range of research organisations globally to better understand their stance on eLife papers and whether or not they are counted when evaluating research contributions.
In total, 95% of respondents said that they still consider eLife papers when carrying out these evaluations. We’ve shared what some of these organisations had to say below, and you can read more in our announcement:
“Web of Science’s decision to pause indexing eLife’s Versions of Record reinforces outdated publishing metrics that hinder innovation. The Journal Impact Factor is an inadequate measure of research quality, and indexers must evolve to support responsible, transparent models like eLife’s. Scientific publishing should prioritize meaningful assessment over arbitrary metrics, and we stand with eLife in advancing a more equitable and open research ecosystem.”
– Ashley Farley, Senior Officer of Knowledge & Research Services, Gates Foundation
“King’s is a signatory to DORA and is working towards membership of COARA. We are committed to responsible research assessment and so have made adjustments to our appointment and promotion processes to recognise diverse and non-traditional outputs, and to advise against the reliance on metrics.”
– Tim Newton, Dean of Research Culture, King’s College London
“It is imperative that we adapt and reinvent the scholarly publishing system, paving the way for alternative publication formats to address major shortcomings in the current system. With publishers taking over Open Access as a business model, in parallel with traditional subscription journals, publishing has become increasingly costly for scientific contributors and, consequently, for those who fund research – much of which is financed by public money. The publication format proposed by eLife is one of a number of new initiatives that represent a significant departure from traditional models, marking a crucial step towards Open Science. Alternative publication models, such as that of eLife, are vital for the future of scholarly publishing, and we must commend eLife for its efforts.”
– Jan D’hooge, Vice Rector of Research Policy at KU Leuven, Belgium
We hope this overall response helps dispel the concern that eLife papers are no longer considered in career and funding opportunities – we’ve shown that in most cases this is unfounded.
Additional support from other organisations
Of course, many other funders and institutions besides those named above and in our announcement have also confirmed that they include research articles in the evaluation process which are not necessarily published in traditional, Impact Factor journals. As stated in our announcement, the responses came from a diverse range of institutions from around the world – many of which are leading universities including several from the Ivy League, Russell Group and League of European Research Universities.
Also, in addition to ongoing support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US), Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (Sweden), the Max Planck Society (Germany) and Wellcome (UK), we received positive responses from other notable funders such as the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (US), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Canada), European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO, Germany), European Research Council, Human Frontier Science Program (France), Kavli Foundation (US), and Swiss National Science Foundation (Switzerland). Additionally, the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently confirmed that it continues to classify eLife as a top-tier journal in its rankings.
Altogether, the overall response so far shows that the Impact Factor has less consideration than perhaps perceived by the general research community. We now invite other research organisations to get in touch and share their views with us, to help us gain an even bigger-picture view of these attitudes towards the Impact Factor and similar metrics.
The deeply ingrained use of these metrics in assessing research contributions means that researchers can still be required, or feel pressured to publish in Impact Factor journals when it comes to applying for funding or seeking career progression. But we can see that it’s time for the community to move away from this reliance on journal-level metrics and push instead for better methods of research assessment – methods such as eLife Assessments – that are much fairer and more nuanced than current metrics can provide.
So, what are we doing now?
We’re still working to promote the eLife Model widely as a way in which research publishing and assessment can be done more effectively and efficiently for everyone’s benefit. And we’re working to inspire a broader move away from the reliance on Impact Factors, towards much more meaningful methods of research assessment.
This will involve rallying even more funders, institutions and other research community members to come together – it isn’t something that one organisation or group can do alone. We invite everyone – those named above and other organisations far and wide – who wish to see reform in research assessment to get in touch, share their views and join us in making it happen. We’re particularly interested in hearing from people whose institutions or funders have said that research published in the eLife Model will be treated differently because of the Impact Factor change. The scientific enterprise can only benefit when the entire community comes together and pushes for much-needed change in the system.
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