Reflecting on eLife's new publication model, 3 years in: "the most important thing we have learnt is that our new approach to publishing works.
-
Reflecting on eLife's new publication model, 3 years in: "the most important thing we have learnt is that our new approach to publishing works. Authors, reviewers and editors routinely tell us that they have had a more constructive experience with the new approach."
Scientific Publishing: Rethinking how research is reviewed and published
Taking a radical new approach to the publication process resulted in eLife losing its impact factor, but authors, reviewers, editors and funders support the journal and its efforts to reform scientific publishing.
eLife (elifesciences.org)
Proud to be an eLife editor. eLife's publication model gets the best from everyone:
* from authors, who remain in control and can reply to reviewers without fear and without being overly apologetic or sycophantic;
* from reviewers, who engage constructively in a semi-anonymous way (they aren't anonymous neither to each other nor to the editors, all practicing scientists in their field), knowing that their comments are suggestions, not mandates for authors;
* and from editors, who don't have to deal with any nastiness from any party, everybody being far more relaxed that I've seen in any other journal, concentrating their efforts in the scientific content.1/3
-
Reflecting on eLife's new publication model, 3 years in: "the most important thing we have learnt is that our new approach to publishing works. Authors, reviewers and editors routinely tell us that they have had a more constructive experience with the new approach."
Scientific Publishing: Rethinking how research is reviewed and published
Taking a radical new approach to the publication process resulted in eLife losing its impact factor, but authors, reviewers, editors and funders support the journal and its efforts to reform scientific publishing.
eLife (elifesciences.org)
Proud to be an eLife editor. eLife's publication model gets the best from everyone:
* from authors, who remain in control and can reply to reviewers without fear and without being overly apologetic or sycophantic;
* from reviewers, who engage constructively in a semi-anonymous way (they aren't anonymous neither to each other nor to the editors, all practicing scientists in their field), knowing that their comments are suggestions, not mandates for authors;
* and from editors, who don't have to deal with any nastiness from any party, everybody being far more relaxed that I've seen in any other journal, concentrating their efforts in the scientific content.1/3
After losing its impact factor (frankly: good riddance):
"like all journals, eLife has always received a number of low quality submissions. We now receive fewer of these, which means that we are currently reviewing a higher proportion of submissions (around 35% in 2025, compared with 27% in 2024)."
We can now focus on bona fide attempts on rigorous scientific research rather than dealing with low-quality manuscripts in search of a stamp of approval. What a win.
"we reviewed and published an average of 84 articles per month in 2025, compared with 143 in 2024."
Quality stayed the same:
"we can measure the quality of the articles we publish in a quantitative manner because, during the review process, we ask reviewers to choose terms that assess the significance of the findings and the strength of evidence in the article. We also did this for the last year of our old model. We have compared the distributions of the terms chosen by reviewers for that year, the period before the Clarivate decision, and the period after, and found them to be remarkably similar."
2/3
-
After losing its impact factor (frankly: good riddance):
"like all journals, eLife has always received a number of low quality submissions. We now receive fewer of these, which means that we are currently reviewing a higher proportion of submissions (around 35% in 2025, compared with 27% in 2024)."
We can now focus on bona fide attempts on rigorous scientific research rather than dealing with low-quality manuscripts in search of a stamp of approval. What a win.
"we reviewed and published an average of 84 articles per month in 2025, compared with 143 in 2024."
Quality stayed the same:
"we can measure the quality of the articles we publish in a quantitative manner because, during the review process, we ask reviewers to choose terms that assess the significance of the findings and the strength of evidence in the article. We also did this for the last year of our old model. We have compared the distributions of the terms chosen by reviewers for that year, the period before the Clarivate decision, and the period after, and found them to be remarkably similar."
2/3
Now, freedom. For example, to explore new ways of facilitating scientific publishing:
"we recently introduced a new article type specifically for Replication Studies. One reason other journals may be reluctant to promote such articles is because they want to protect their impact factor!"
Want to publish a paper in eLife? Happy to assist, ask me anything. I handle mostly neuroscience manuscripts, also sometimes in developmental biology and in new techniques for microscopy or image processing for bioimagery.
3/3
-
R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
-
Reflecting on eLife's new publication model, 3 years in: "the most important thing we have learnt is that our new approach to publishing works. Authors, reviewers and editors routinely tell us that they have had a more constructive experience with the new approach."
Scientific Publishing: Rethinking how research is reviewed and published
Taking a radical new approach to the publication process resulted in eLife losing its impact factor, but authors, reviewers, editors and funders support the journal and its efforts to reform scientific publishing.
eLife (elifesciences.org)
Proud to be an eLife editor. eLife's publication model gets the best from everyone:
* from authors, who remain in control and can reply to reviewers without fear and without being overly apologetic or sycophantic;
* from reviewers, who engage constructively in a semi-anonymous way (they aren't anonymous neither to each other nor to the editors, all practicing scientists in their field), knowing that their comments are suggestions, not mandates for authors;
* and from editors, who don't have to deal with any nastiness from any party, everybody being far more relaxed that I've seen in any other journal, concentrating their efforts in the scientific content.1/3
@albertcardona
It whips ass, makes perfect sense, and is working extremely well from all externally visible evidence and for some reason most of the biologists I know think its regarded as a failed experiment. -
@albertcardona
It whips ass, makes perfect sense, and is working extremely well from all externally visible evidence and for some reason most of the biologists I know think its regarded as a failed experiment.I've only met two so far who voiced anything like that – who admitted the percent of eLife papers who request a version of record while assessed as "incomplete" or "inadequate" (jointly less than 6% in 2025) amounts to nothing in light of the Retraction Index of high profile journals (from 2014: https://bjoern.brembs.net/2019/03/new-england-journal-of-medicine-and-you-thought-nature-was-expensive/ ), which, they also admitted, makes the Clarivate point entirely moot.
-
I've only met two so far who voiced anything like that – who admitted the percent of eLife papers who request a version of record while assessed as "incomplete" or "inadequate" (jointly less than 6% in 2025) amounts to nothing in light of the Retraction Index of high profile journals (from 2014: https://bjoern.brembs.net/2019/03/new-england-journal-of-medicine-and-you-thought-nature-was-expensive/ ), which, they also admitted, makes the Clarivate point entirely moot.
On the #RetractionIndex see:
"Retracted Science and the Retraction Index", Ferric C. Fang and Arturo Casadevall, 2011.
«We defined a “retraction index” for each journal as the number of retractions in the time interval from 2001 to 2010, multiplied by 1,000, and divided by the number of published articles with abstracts.»
To further add that *retractions in scientific publishing have increased* since 2011:
* From 2022: "Retractions are increasing, but not enough", https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02071-6
* From 2025: "Our results revealed a 12–20% increase in retractions over decades in conference proceedings as well as journals", https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40979-025-00193-8
* From 2025: "Retractions Increase 10-Fold in 20 Years - and Now AI is Involved", https://www.aapsnewsmagazine.org/aapsnewsmagazine/articles/new-page3/feb25/meetings-feb25 -
R relay@relay.publicsquare.global shared this topicR relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
