eLife’s mission has been to innovate and improve the way research is communicated. This led us, in October 2022, to announce a new model for publishing, which is now live and waiting for your submissions.
How the new process works
Submissions will now follow five steps:
- Submission
- Peer review
- Publication
- Author revision
- Version of Record
Read more about our new process.
The future of science publishing
As part of the new process we will no longer make accept/reject decisions at the end of the peer-review process.
All papers that have been peer-reviewed will be published on the eLife website as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by:
- An eLife assessment
- Public reviews
Authors will then receive a paper with a full DOI that can be used on funding applications. They will be able to include a response to the assessment and reviews, and decide what to do next:
- Revise and resubmit
- Declare the Reviewed Preprint as the final Version of Record
As our Editor-in-Chief, Michael Eisen, said in our recent webinar: “We're giving authors back control that they really never should have lost.”
Why have we made these changes?
We believe this offers a more transparent, faster and fairer way to publish:
- Following peer review all work will be published on our website, typically within a few weeks, eliminating the traditional accept/reject decision.
- Displaying public reviews and an eLife assessment alongside preprints shifts the focus away from journal titles, by providing valuable insights to help readers assess the research based on its own merits.
We answered your questions
When we announced this new model, we knew there’d be questions, so we asked you to put them to members of our senior editorial team.
The webinar covered questions around our criteria for selecting papers for review, the public review process, and what happens after review.
Submit your work
To have your preprint reviewed as part of our new model, you can now submit here.
We will also be keeping our traditional publishing process open for a limited time while authors and readers get used to this new system.
It’s in your hands: choose to publish the traditional way, or help us to challenge and change science publishing.
If you’d like to learn more about the new process, we encourage you to:
- Explore ‘Peer Review without gatekeeping’ by Eisen et al.
- Take a look at the frequently asked questions for authors
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Questions and comments are welcome. Please annotate publicly on the article or contact us at hello [at] elifesciences [dot] org.
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