Science Surf

Elife is one of the most interesting scientific journals with a full history at Wikipedia. The Elife board introduced in 2022 that

From next year, eLife is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review, instead focusing on public reviews and assessments of preprint

with the unfortunate but foreseeable consequence that Elife now does not get anymore an impact factor

Clarivate, the provider of the Web of Science platform, said it would not provide impact factors to journals that publish papers not recommended for publication by reviewers.

I don’t care about impact factors. I also do not care about Clarivate or any other Private-Equity-company as we don’t need this kind of business in science. Elife however will loose it’s value in particular as system still has some flaws.

DeevyBee commented already about them a year ago

there is a fatal flaw in the new model, which is that it still relies on editors to decide which papers go forward to review, using a method that will do nothing to reduce the tendency to hype and the consequent publication bias that ensues. I blogged about this a year ago, and suggested a simple solution, which is for the editors to adopt ‘results-blind’ review when triaging papers. This is an idea that has been around at least since 1976 (Mahoney, 1976) which has had a resurgence in popularity in recent years, with growing awareness of the dangers of publication bias (Locasio, 2017). The idea is that editorial decisions should be made based on whether the authors had identified an interesting question and whether their methods were adequate to give a definitive answer to that question.

So the idea is that the editors get the title and a modified abstract with no author names and without results.

Following the recent announcement of eLife to overcome a accept/reject decision

We have found that these public preprint reviews and assessments are far more effective than binary accept or reject decisions ever could be at conveying the thinking of our reviewers and editors, and capturing the nuanced, multidimensional, and often ambiguous nature of peer review.

there are now many complaints

Destroying eLife’s reputation for selectivity does not serve science. Changes that pretend scientists do not care about publishing in highly selective journals will end eLife’s crucial role in science publishing, says long-time supporter Paul Bieniasz

While the announcement could have come in a more polite way – creating a second tier of an eLife archive – I believe this is a good decision.The rejection attitude is basically driven that “your inferior paper would harm my journal impact” while it just goes to another journal. Publication is seldom stopped so it produces workload at other journals and for other reviewers in particular when the initial reviews are not public.

The eLife decision therefore breaks a vicious circle.

27.11.2024

Unfortunately, eLife is now starting again to reject papers. From an email that I received this month

In this case the editorial team felt that the manuscript should be reviewed by a more specialized community. Where results are principally useful within a specialised community, then it is likely that this audience can evaluate the paper themselves, so the public reviews and assessments carry less value. We also think that in these cases more specialised journals are likely to be able to find more suitable technical reviewers than eLife.
We wish you good luck in getting your work reviewed and published by another journal.

eLife is also been delisted now, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to fire Michael Eisen.

Tag Archives: Elife

elife delisted

Too many complaints about eLife