A publisher aiming to transform how scientists share research results has launched a new experiment. Last week, eLife—a nonprofit, selective, online-only journal that focuses on the life and medical sciences—announced it will cease accepting or rejecting manuscripts for publication, instead offering only peer reviews of manuscripts.
Until now, eLife has charged authors $3000 if it accepts their paper, which is free to read after publication. Under the new approach, eLife will charge authors $2000 if they accept the publisher’s offer to have a submitted manuscript undergo peer review. Regardless of whether the critiques are positive or negative, the manuscript and its associated, unsigned peer-review statements will be posted online and be free to read. If the author revises the paper to address the comments, eLife will post the new version.
Since eLife was founded in 2012, it has tried other innovations. In 2020, for example, it started to require all submitted manuscripts be published as preprints. Abandoning the “accept” stamp is a logical next step, says eLife’s editor-in-chief, biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley.
Eisen, who co-founded the open-access Public Library of Science journals in 2003, says the detailed critiques written by reviewers that eLife recruits are its main contribution to the scientific process. The reviews, he says, are “more nuanced, more informative, and more useful to the community than our thumbs-up or thumbsdown publishing decision.” He also argues that the new model will speed up a peer-review process that at other journals is often opaque and slow because it can involve multiple rounds.
Not everyone shares Eisen’s vision. “I have zero interest in reading other people’s peer reviews,” tweeted Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History. “Turning reviews into supplemental publications is silly.” And the new model could struggle because in most fields, the majority of researchers do not post their manuscripts as preprints.
eLife’s new approach, which takes full effect in January 2023, is not entirely original. The online platform F1000Research, for example, enables researchers to post manuscripts, which others can then review. Eisen hopes eLife will distinguish itself in this new marketplace by the quality of its critiques.
eLife is still finalizing details of its new model, including how editors will decide which papers to invite for review. They will likely ask prospective reviewers for their sense of which papers will be most “useful” to critique, Eisen says, perhaps because they present a valuable new method or, conversely, represent flawed science that requires correction. Like a handful of other journals, however, eLife will not consider the manuscript’s perceived scientific importance, leaving that to readers to assess.
The publisher plans to enable authors to declare a reviewed manuscript the final “version of record.” That will allow a key group of researchers—those funded by the National Institutes of Health—to meet NIH’s requirement that their work be indexed by its PubMed search engine. Authors will also be able to submit an eLife-reviewed manuscript to a different journal for publication, but only if they and eLife have not declared it final.
Eisen says that, at $2000 per review, eLife should cover its costs without using the subsidies from donors that have backed the publisher since its founding. And he hopes the new policy will ultimately cause the publisher to fade into the background. “I would hope that we move pretty quickly to a world where … you won’t be citing eLife at all, because you’ll be citing the authors work” as it appears on a preprint server.
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