eLife has announced the appointment of Fiona Hutton as its new Head of Publishing. A long-time advocate for open science, Hutton will lead eLife’s transformation to a ‘publish, then review’ model that puts preprints first.
Originally a life scientist specializing in cancer virology, Hutton brings 20 years of STM publishing experience to eLife, including her most recent positions as Head of STM Open Access Publishing and Executive Publisher at Cambridge University Press, UK. She succeeds Interim Head of Publishing Peter Rodgers.
In the 10 years since its inception, eLife has made significant progress in improving how research in the life and biomedical sciences is communicated. Following the rising popularity of preprints among the life science community over recent years, the journal shifted to a ‘publish, then review’ model that emphasises preprints and public reviews. This move represented a step towards eLife’s vision of an overall ‘publish, review, curate’ model that allows people to assess the trustworthiness of new results and navigate the growing preprint landscape more easily.
Reporting to Executive Director Damian Pattinson, Hutton will be responsible for the running of the eLife journal, overseeing its ongoing transition to the ‘publish, then review’ model. This involves evaluating eLife’s editorial workflows and technology to support the model, redefining the magazine section, and experimenting with ways of enhancing peer-reviewed preprints before they are published in the journal.
While working as a post doctorate at Columbia University in 2001, Hutton and her peers signed an open letter to scientific publishers that called for a freely accessible library of published research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences. She has since continued pushing for this goal, helping to shift the narrative from “why open access” to “when”.
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