The MIT Libraries is pleased to announce that MIT authors who publish in eLife, the open access, nonprofit biomedical and life sciences journal, can now do so at no cost.

eLife’s model is pushing the boundaries of the academic journal, moving away from the “review, then publish” tradition of most publications. Instead, eLife’s open, collaborative peer review process results in “reviewed preprints,” and authors can decide how and where to further disseminate the version of record. Editors no longer make accept and reject decisions. As a result of these changes, eLife recently lost its impact factor, a metric traditionally used as a flawed proxy for a journal’s quality and prestige. The journal sees this “as a necessary step in challenging outdated publishing models,” they wrote on their site earlier this year. “At eLife, we’ve always believed that research should be judged on its own merits, not simply on where it’s published.”

Learn more about publishing and peer review with eLife.

The Libraries open access publishing support site provides information on how to take advantage of this and other open access publishing opportunities for MIT authors.

We encourage the MIT community to be in touch when you see new innovative opportunities to publish your research open access. The MIT Libraries remains committed to maximizing the impact of scholarship created by MIT authors and bringing knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges.