eLife, a new open access journal for outstanding scientific advancements, has published its first four research articles. The journal is being published by eLife, a collaboration between the funders and practitioners of research to communicate discoveries in the life and biomedical sciences in the most effective way. The researcher-led initiative is backed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. The new journal will cover outstanding advances in life science and biomedicine, and also serve as a platform for experimentation and showcasing innovation in research communication.
The eLife journal web site is set for launch by the end of 2012. The first collection of articles is ,listed at the eLife web site with the full content available at the online archive of the US National Library of Medicine, PubMed Central (PMC), and its mirror sites including UKPMC.
eLife's initial collection of content describes a hormone involved in response to starvation that dramatically increases the lifespan of mice in which it is overexpressed, although further research into side effects is needed. It also explains a critical signalling molecule involved in the interaction between a species of single-celled organisms and bacteria – an important advance in efforts to understand the evolution of multicellularity.
The article collection also includes the results of a two-year field trial that demonstrates how a specific group of chemicals released by plants in response to herbivore attack can increase the fitness of the plants in the Darwinian sense of increasing reproductive success. It also describes how cells cope with the stress of poorly folded proteins, and specifically how fission yeast deploys the same cellular machinery as other organisms but in an unusual and very different way.
Links to the freely available full text for each article, plain-language summaries, expert commentaries, and an editorial describing the motivations behind this move, are available at http://www.elifesciences.org/articles. The initiative will continue to publish accepted articles this fall, in advance of the final development and launch of the eLife journal web site, towards the end of the year.
