Open Access Publishing: Editorial Team Announced for eLife, New Open Access Journal

From a Howard Hughes Medical Institute News Release

The senior editorial team is today announced for eLife, the new top-tier, open-access research journal to be launched next year with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust.
The senior editorial team is comprised of internationally-renowned, active researchers from Europe, North America and Asia. They will operate independently of the founding organizations and will ensure fair, swift and high-quality editorial decisions.
Editor-in-chief Randy Schekman and managing executive editor Mark Patterson will be joined by deputy editors, Fiona Watt, currently at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Detlef Weigel from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tubingen, Germany. They will be supported by around 15-20 senior editors – researchers who represent a broad range of biomedical and life science research fields.
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Over the next few months, the senior editorial team will identify around 150 experts to serve as members of a board of reviewing editors. One of the specific goals of the editorial process is to provide authors with a decision letter that integrates the reviewers’ comments and clearly identifies points that need to be addressed for successful acceptance. The overall aims are to speed up the review process, provide explicit and coherent advice to authors and reduce the often unnecessary and burdensome requests that come from multiple disparate critiques.
eLife will seek to publish all research considered to be highly influential in its potential to advance our understanding, to drive a field forward, or in its real-world outcomes. The editorial team will assess submissions efficiently and fairly on the basis of their intrinsic merits.
For an initial period, to help establish the journal, no fees will be charged to authors. In time, it is anticipated that authors will be charged an article-processing fee to cover some of the on-going costs of publication.
The first issue of eLife is expected late next year. The journal will utilise the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY 3.0) so that the content can be shared and used without restriction.

Read the Complete News Release
See Also: PLoS Director of Publishing Moves to New OA Initiative (October 10, 2011)
See Also: “Three Biomedical Funders to Launch Open Access Journal” (June 27, 2011)

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