eLife has always encouraged authors to talk openly about their work in progress and to release accepted manuscripts if they wanted to. However, eLife’s editors -- who are all working scientists -- wanted to take this a step further and get newly accepted research into the hands of other scientists as soon as possible.
“The work that eLife does to enhance the presentation of every story and help data to travel more widely across the web is absolutely important for science today,” said Detlef Weigel, eLife Deputy editor and Director of the Molecular Biology Department for the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology. “But we also just want to read the papers as soon as we can. We’re a very selective journal -- going for the most promising studies -- and these should be available to scientists as soon as possible. We welcome this service and are pleased to present it to our colleagues.”
With this service, the author’s manuscript will be made openly available in PDF format, along with supporting information, on the eLife website (under “Upcoming”) and will be listed in PubMed. The fully formatted version of the paper (the version of record in the language of publishers) will follow on about a month later. This version includes a plain-language summary (called the “eLife digest”), figures, videos, and tables presented in line with the text, sortable references, an accompanying expert commentary in some cases, and more. This is also the version that is propagated to other resources such as PubMed Central and supports text and data mining.
New accepted manuscripts are available to read now at http://www.elifesciences.org/upcoming/
______________________________________