Annual Report: 2024 in review

2024 was a year of stability and consolidation for eLife, after the turbulence of 2023. The year started with our new publish-review-curate (PRC) model entering its second year, and submissions grew steadily for most of the year. Indeed, in September we celebrated the fact that we had received 10,000 submissions under the model.

In October, however, it was announced that articles published in eLife would no longer be indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), and that eLife would not receive a Journal Impact Factor for 2024. eLife has never supported the Journal Impact Factor but, unfortunately, it is still considered important in many countries – as is inclusion in the SCIE – and so, as expected, we saw a decline in submissions from some parts of the world. However, also as expected, we continued to receive many high-quality submissions, demonstrating that researchers understand the value of our model even in the absence of traditional, and unreliable, metrics.

Two of the defining features of the PRC model at eLife are that we only review articles that are available as preprints, and that everything we send for review gets published as a Reviewed Preprint. This places additional focus on the initial decision about an article (that is, should it be peer-reviewed or not?), and this was the subject of an Editorial written by more than 70 editors and 8 members of the eLife Early-Career Advisory Group (ECAG) in July. The article was well-received and gave authors a clearer sense of what to expect from our Editorial evaluation process.

Staff in the rest of the organisation were are also busy in 2024, as evidenced by the launch of three new initiatives: the Community Voices podcast, the Global South Committee for Open Science, and eLife Magazine Highlights, a fortnightly email newsletter alerting subscribers to interesting articles in the magazine section of the journal. Our technology team also continued to improve our article pages, making new versions and statuses clearer to readers in a way that would win us an industry UX award.

2024 also started with eLife having two co-Editors-in-Chief – Timothy (Tim) Behrens and Detlef Weigel. Tim and Detlef had previously been Deputy Editors and agreed to be co-Editors-in-Chief for the duration of 2024, so that a new Editor-in-Chief could be recruited to take over at the start of 2025. I was delighted that Tim was appointed to the role of Editor-in-Chief, and that Detlef agreed to stay with us as a Senior Editor.

Dr Joanne Hackett
Chair, eLife Board of Directors

Having launched our new approach to publishing in January 2023, we were able to see a year later what happens when authors are given more control over the publication process.

By the end of January 2024, we had published 1,332 Reviewed Preprints, or 1,836 when we include revised versions. Where authors had decided to revise their work, we saw modest changes in the eLife Assessments in how editors described the significance of the findings, but larger changes in how they described the strength of evidence. Notably, articles originally deemed ‘incomplete’ improved in 77.5% of cases after revision, showing how the process helps authors make substantive improvements to their papers. There were a small number of cases (2–3%) where authors chose to go straight to the publication of their final Version of Record without first revising their Reviewed Preprint, with the main reasons being that their paper had already been evaluated positively by reviewers, or because key lab members had moved on.

We also saw how our model allows authors to make their peer-reviewed work available to read, cite and share as quickly as possible. The median time from submission to publication of a Reviewed Preprint (first version) was 98 days – two and a half times faster than the median submission to publication time in the model ending with an accept–reject decision.

In a survey carried out with authors, we found that the quality of the eLife journal remained the top reason for their decision to publish with us. The second reason was to experience our model, and they rated the overall quality of our public reviews and assessments highly. Testament to the benefits of the model, September marked a key milestone for us as we celebrated 10,000 submissions. We marked the occasion with a reflective piece on how the model is making a positive impact, the practicalities of submitting research to the model, and highlighting author feedback from their experience of publishing with us. This included perspectives from Ushio Masayuki (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Chunxiao Li (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Patrick Allard (University of California, Los Angeles).

We always knew that challenging the status quo in publishing was never going to be easy. Despite agreeing that our peer-review process continues to be robust and rigorous, Clarivate, which runs Web of Science, informed us in October that our model was not eligible for a Journal Impact Factor. Following discussions with Clarivate, we made the decision to be partially indexed in Web of Science, ultimately forgoing our Impact Factor.

While eLife has never supported the Impact Factor, we understand that it is still important for authors in some settings. In acknowledgement of our efforts to move away from this inadequate measure of research quality, we received strong overall support from researchers and the wider research community who we kept informed about Clarivate’s decisions at every stage. So we ended the year with a promise that we would remain in close touch with our funders, partner institutions and colleagues throughout the community to address any concerns as we proceeded with our new indexing status. And to show that the right changes are worth it, even if they’re not easy, we published in December a look back at the key moments, announcements and content that made our 2024.

Our Technology and Innovation team kept busy throughout 2024 with the ongoing development of Reviewed Preprints to make them as useful for everyone as possible. We created the eLife Model to end binary accept–reject decisions after peer review and focus instead on the public review and assessment of preprints. But after hearing that some readers still assumed eLife’s Reviewed Preprints were revised and “accepted” before publication, and that the difference between versions was unclear, the team carried out textual and visual changes to address this feedback. The results of their work included more detailed and colour-coded indications of the status of a Reviewed Preprint and the repositioning of the eLife Assessments so that they sit above the abstract (see an example here), increasing their prominence and readership on the article pages. The team also made related changes to other pages to give readers clearer information about the process.

In addition to achieving these results, the tremendous efforts that went into gathering feedback and continuously improving Reviewed Preprints throughout the year culminated in what would turn out to be a successful application in November for the industry-renowned UX Award.

Over on Sciety, the platform created by eLife, the team made strides in their mission to enable the discovery, evaluation and organisation of preprints. In 2024, Sciety became home to 36,000 evaluated preprints, with 76,000 evaluations from 27 reviewing groups or organisations. One of the most exciting developments for the team was expanding the range of preprint servers supported by the platform. By going beyond its initial life sciences focus to include articles from across OSF preprint servers, including MetaArXiv, EarthArXiv, EcoEvoRxiv, preprints.org and more, Sciety enabled researchers to discover and evaluate preprints in a much broader spectrum of scientific disciplines.

As we reported in 2023, eLife and PREreview announced support from the COAR Notify Initiative to help strengthen the connections between preprint review and curation services for authors, journals and the wider scientific community. The Sciety team progressed this work in 2024 by developing the COAR Notify protocol to enhance communication between PREreview, Kotahi, Peer Community In and other research platforms.

Additionally, their efforts to engage more community members led to two new partnerships and reviewing groups being added to Sciety during the year: Access Microbiology – the first society-run open research platform to join the community, and MetaRoR – a platform designed to transform how metaresearch is reviewed and shared, using a flavour of the PRC model adopted by eLife.

MetaRoR launched in November 2024 as a collaborative initiative from the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) and the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS). The project uses Kotahi, a scholar-led communications platform developed by the Kotahi Foundation to support pioneering models of publishing and peer review. Ahead of its launch, colleagues from Kotahi and eLife assisted the MetaRoR team in understanding the entire publishing process and provided the technical support needed to integrate the platform with Kotahi. Afterwards, MetaRoR joined Sciety to bring the expert evaluations from its platform to a wider audience. In this way, eLife, Kotahi, MetaRoR and Sciety worked together – and continue working together – to advance the PRC model and build the necessary infrastructure to support it, showcasing the power of collaboration to drive much-needed innovation in open research. The Sciety team celebrated this and other successes in their wrap-up of 2024.

It was another busy year for our Communities team in 2024, as they continued working with researchers across the globe to promote openness, integrity, equity, diversity and inclusion in research.

The first major development of the year was the launch of the eLife Global South Committee for Open Science in February. Recognising that researchers from the Global South are often underrepresented and minoritised in scientific publishing, and that the eLife Model has the potential to make publishing a more inclusive enterprise, we set up this Committee to help us strive towards greater involvement within science communication and innovation. The group is a pillar of guidance on improving the chances of Global South researchers to participate in open science and increasing eLife’s outreach and support across these regions.

April also proved a busy month for the team, as they opened a call for new members to join the ECAG – a team that influences and supports our mission, as well as voices the needs and aspirations of early-career researchers within eLife. We also invited applications to the Ben Barres Spotlight Awards, available to researchers from underrepresented backgrounds or countries with limited funding to support their research, career and community. The 6 elected ECAG members and 14 Ben Barres Spotlight award recipients were both announced in July.

In May, we published a reflection on the global impact and achievements of the eLife Community Ambassadors, summarising some of the work, events and projects they have contributed to. This was followed later in the year with our call for applications to join the next cohort of Ambassadors. May also saw the launch of the eLife Community Voices podcast as a platform for scientists from diverse backgrounds to share their experiences. Complementing the already established eLife podcast, which focuses on discussing recent research, Community Voices shines a light on the people behind the research. Each episode consists of interviews with academics from all walks of life, as they provide insights into their journeys that shaped their careers.

With these initiatives and more, we made significant progress on our equity, diversity and inclusion commitments in 2024. We continued to publish our twice-yearly updates in April and November, highlighting our key activities and achievements, and looking ahead to what comes next.

eLife once again published a significant number of research articles in 2024, covering all areas of the life sciences and medicine, along with Magazine articles on topics of broader interest. We provide some highlights of this content below.

Research highlights

The following articles represent some of the high-impact research published in eLife in 2024, either as a Reviewed Preprint (any version) or final Version of Record. They were deemed by our editors to be either ‘fundamental’ or ‘landmark’ in their significance.

This collaborative work by Takemura et al. – the first in a series of three papers – introduced the generation and analysis of a connectome resource for the entire ventral nerve cord of a fruit fly, a model organism that is widely used to study the nervous system.

Image credit: Takemura et al. (CC BY 4.0)

Shang and Kojetin revealed the intricate structural mechanisms by which both covalent and non-covalent synthetic ligands co-occupy the binding pocket of the nuclear receptor transcription factor PPARγ, with findings that have far-reaching implications for the broader field of nuclear receptor research.

Image credit: Shang and Kojetin (CC BY 4.0)

Moeller, Mon Père et al. developed mathematical methods for inferring certain evolutionary parameters of interest from RNA data in healthy tissue and during hematopoiesis – the production of blood cells – with the eLife Assessment describing the evidence in the paper as ‘exceptional’.

Image credit: Arek Socha from Pixabay

Lewis et al. presented a structural analysis of the dynamic ribosome-translocon complex in a study that the reviewers said "represents the most significant breakthrough in membrane and secretory biogenesis in recent years".

Image credit: Lewis et al. (CC BY 4.0)

Noorman et al. presented this new finding to the field interested in recurrent processing and its neuromodulatory underpinnings, discovering unexpectedly that a drug called memantine enhances the decoding of features thought to rely on NMDA receptors.

Image credit: Enis Can Ceyhan on Unsplash

This study by Ober, Githure, Santos et al. shed light on a long-standing puzzle in protein kinase A activation in Trypanosoma, with exceptional evidence for the conclusions reported, representing a significant advance in our understanding of the molecular mechanism of cyclic nucleotide binding domains.

​Image credit: CDC/Dr. Myron G. Schultz via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Duewell, Wilson et al. reported new insights into the mechanisms responsible for the activation of a kinase called PI3Kβ, showing that a process called allosteric regulation has an important role in activating the kinase.

Image credit: Duewell, Wilson et al. (CC BY 4.0)

This study by de Lange, Tomes et al. looked at the connection between Taenia solium infection and epilepsy, providing convincing evidence that glutamate secretion by the parasite’s larvae depolarises neurons and contributes to epilepsy during infection – although the exact cause is still uncertain.

Image credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Using state-of-the-art methods, this study by DeHaro-Arbona et al. advanced our understanding of how Notch signalling activates transcription by analysing the dynamics of the Mastermind transcriptional co-activator and its role in the activation complex.

Image credit: Fred the Oyster via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)