Why publish with eLife?
Publishing with eLife is different because we are committed to making peer review and publishing better for science and scientists. In particular, the publish-review-curate (PRC) approach used by eLife combines the speed and openness of preprints with the scrutiny offered by peer review. Once an article has been selected for peer review, the authors can be sure that it will be published in eLife as a Reviewed Preprint. This is a new type of scientific publication that includes the article, feedback from the reviewers, and an eLife Assessment that summarizes the significance of the findings being reported and the strength of the evidence. This approach emphasizes the scientific content of individual articles rather than journal name.
What scientists are saying
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I believe peer review should serve only one purpose, and that is to examine to what extent a manuscript's claims are backed up by the evidence presented. Too often highly subjective factors – such as perceived impact or 'journal-worthiness' – influence the peer-review process. Moreover, you can be asked for months' or even years' worth of new experiments that have little to do with improving scientific rigor, and are more aimed at extending the paper in some way.
I love the idea of handing full control over the final version to the authors, so that they can decide whether and how to respond to reviewer comments with no threat of rejection.
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The publishing process was very smooth, and we truly appreciated the freedom it offered alongside the depth of discussion with the reviewers. What pleasantly surprised us was that, even though the model allows authors to choose which comments to address, the review process still involved multiple rounds of thoughtful and constructive feedback. It felt just as rigorous as traditional peer review – but without the gatekeeping, delays, or pressure to reshape the work around overly broad reviewer demands.
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One reason why we submitted our paper to eLife was its unique review process. Our studies often involve the integration of many different experimental and statistical methods, and the more methods that are used in a paper, the higher the chance the paper will be criticized by the reviewers and go on to the rejected by the journal, even if it is heading in the right direction. Under these circumstances, eLife's new model, which has abandoned the accept/reject decision, seemed to be a good fit for our paper.
