As eLife receives a substantial number of submissions on neuroscience topics, the organisation has joined the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC), a cross-publisher alliance of journals which aims to reduce the time and effort involved in the peer review and publication of original neuroscience research.
eLife’s mission is to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. As part of this goal, the organisation publishes important research in all areas of the life and biomedical sciences, which is selected and evaluated by working scientists and made freely available online without delay.
One way in which eLife works to improve the overall efficiency of the publishing process is by sharing referee reports and identities (where the individuals agree) with another journal of the corresponding author’s choice. In keeping with this philosophy, the NPRC permits authors whose papers are not accepted by one journal in the Consortium to request that the reviews be forwarded to a second participating journal. This process, which comes with no additional cost, reduces the workload for authors, reviewers and editors, and helps speed up the time to publication.
The idea of the NPRC arose originally from journal editors who saw that many strong neuroscience manuscripts were being rejected because the research was not deemed appropriate for their journals, or because of space limitations – a challenge that eLife also addressed with the establishment of its online journal that allows for continuous publication of articles of any length.
Eve Marder, eLife Deputy Editor and and Professor of Biology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, says: “We are delighted to join an alliance of journals that understand the importance of making the publishing process as quick and simple for scientists as possible. In light of the healthy number of neuroscience submissions that eLife receives, we hope that joining the NPRC will allow more authors to benefit from transferring peer reviews.”
The NPRC is made up of over 60 journals, including the Journal of Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, Developmental Neurobiology, eNeuro and Neuroscience. To find out more about the Consortium and how other journals can join, please visit: http://nprc.incf.org.
