Scientists in the lab and in the field are closest to cutting-edge research. But at top scientific journals, it’s professional editors who ultimately decide what gets published. A new journal scheduled to make its debut next year aims to change that by putting scientists in the editors’ chair.
Called eLife, it will cover a wide range of life sciences, “from computational biology on one end to clinical science on the other end,” says its editor in chief, Randy Schekman. It will be fully open access and online only. Unlike many journals, it won’t ask its authors to shoulder any publication fees or so-called page charges, at least not at first. And working scientists like Mr. Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, will be completely in charge of the editorial process.
“There’s a great deal of displeasure in the life-science community with the control of journals that don’t use scientists to make decisions,” Mr. Schekman told me. “There are many scientific journals that have scientists as editors, but they have not captured the same kinds of very interesting, groundbreaking studies that are published in Cell, Nature, and Science.” Lured by name prestige, researchers route their best work to those journals. That means they neglect other outlets where scientist-editors have more control.
It’s not easy for a new journal to compete with titans like Cell. But eLife has some things going for it that could make it an attractive alternative for authors. It has active scientists at the helm. It draws on the financial backing of three major supporters of scientific research. And it has sketched out a peer-review process that’s quick and based on discussion rather than on lone, idiosyncratic decisions.
Mr. Schekman does not think the big journals are entirely to blame for the current situation. Academe rewards those who publish in flagship journals with high impact factors, which take the average number of citations received over a certain period as a measure of influence. Elite journals “are a victim of their own success and our vanity, so they have to impose what some of us consider capricious limits on what they publish,” eLife’s editor says. Because of the volume of submissions, very few papers make the grade, and “sometimes the decision rests on one comment from one referee who may not like the paper, even if the others like it a lot,” Mr. Schekman says. “Too often the professional editor simply collates the reviews and sends them to the author,” without enough weight given to the varying quality of the reviews.
To get around that problem, eLife wants reviewers to consult with one another before they pass judgment. The scientists on the senior editorial board—18 have signed up so far—will do a first review of submitted papers. Mr. Schekman expects that maybe a third of the submissions will make it to the next stage. Those selected will be sent on to a couple of appropriate reviewers on the general editorial board. That board will include as many as 150 scientists from various life-science fields.
Before they reach a final decision, the referees will discuss it in an online space run by the journal. “It doesn’t require real-time interaction,” the editor explains. “You just type your comments and they pop up on someone else’s screen.” Reviewers will defend and discuss their recommendations and reach a consensus. The senior editor involved will adjudicate the process, write up the results, and send them to the author—ideally within a month of a paper’s first being submitted.
Mr. Schekman hopes this consensus-driven approach will take care of a common frustration among reviewers: They’re not able to weigh in on other critiques before a final decision gets made. “Having a consultation session before the initial letter is sent to the author would be a substantial change,” he says. “This has not been done, as far as I’m aware, at journals.”
He acknowledges that scientists are already swamped with requests to review papers, and that eLife’s approach means “asking people to do more work than they’d normally do.” To sweeten the deal—and to make it clear to board members, editors, and reviewers that the journal expects them to take the work seriously—the journal will pay them for their time. Mr. Schekman wouldn’t tell me how much but described it as “more than a token.” The sum’s enough, he said, “to let them know that we mean business.” Members of the senior editorial board have agreed to commit approximately seven hours a week of their time to start.
Mr. Schekman was editor of PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, for five years. And, lest one worry that scientists know research but don’t know how to publish magazines, eLife will also hire publishing pros to do the production work involved. For instance, Mr. Schekman just recruited Mark Patterson, who helped get the PLoS journal series off the ground. (He says that PLoS has been supportive, seeing eLife as another boost for open access.) The eLife team will also select a scholarly publisher to work with. It expects to issue a request-for-proposals by the end of the year.
In a sign that those who pay for scientific research want to be more active in seeing it through to its logical conclusion—publication—three major backers of scientific research have ponied up the money for eLife. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and Britain’s Wellcome Trust are the financial angels behind the venture.
At the Berlin 9 Open Access conference, held in early November at the institute in Bethesda, Md., I heard Robert Kiley, head of digital services at the trust, explain the eLife backers’ rationale. Grant makers have realized that publication costs are research costs, he told the gathering. The financers saw a need for a journal that can take advantage of the digital environment and give scientists the power to make “rapid, transparent, and scientifically based editorial decisions.”
Isn’t it risky to have the people who pay for research also pay for a journal to publish it? Maybe. The three supporters required that eLife’s top editors include scientists whose work has been supported by them. Mr. Schekman is a Hughes researcher at Berkeley. His deputy editors are Fiona Watt, a cancer researcher at King’s College London, and Detlef Weigel, director of the molecular-biology department at the Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany.
But the editor says they’ve been assured that eLife will be “absolutely independent,” and that researchers who have grants from any of the backers will not get preferential treatment. “There’ll be no special privileges for those people,” he told me.
That’s a change from what Mr. Schekman says he experienced at the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, which he edited for five years. Academy members do have a publishing advantage there, he says.
The backers have given the journal three to five years to get up and running and to develop a sustainable business plan. The ultimate success of eLife probably depends most on whether it can attract top-flight papers—the kind that now go first to Cell, Nature, and Science. “If we can in the first few months get some articles that are seen as groundbreaking, that will take care of matters,” the editor says, pointing to Cell‘s early success as an example. “The senior editors are going to be apostles” and help steer researchers toward the new journal, he adds. “They all go to meetings, they all know the really interesting results out there.”
Most editors of new journals fret until their publication is old enough to generate impact factors. Not Mr. Schekman, who objects to the grip such metrics have on scientific publishing and how the numbers can be skewed. “Where people want to publish is so heavily influenced by the so-called impact factor,” he told me. “I hope to avoid that nonsense, at least for two years.”
The editors of eLife expect to begin accepting submissions in the spring. Look for its first issue late next year.
