The open-access journal eLife is dropping one of its most distinctive features - free publishing. From 2017, it will charge a fee of $2,500 for all accepted papers.
Most open-access journals already charge for publishing, because they have few other ways to bring in cash. But eLife, which launched in 2012, has until now had its expenses covered by grants from three of the world's largest private research funders: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland; the Wellcome Trust in London; and the Max Planck Society in Berlin.
These backers want to create an elite online journal that can compete for authors’ best papers against leading subscription publications (such as Nature, Science and Cell), yet still be open access. The three funders set up the non-profit eLife organisation, and have committed to provide it with £43 million ($56 million) over 10 years.
According to executive director Mark Patterson, the journal now needs another revenue stream to put its publishing business on a more sustainable footing as the number of papers that it receives increases.
The journal's decision to start charging might mean that it loses some prospective authors, notes Kent Anderson, the former publisher of Science and now chief executive of the analytics firm RedLink in Westborough, Massachusetts.
Open-access journals charge a wide variety of fees — a range that has sparked fierce debate over how much scientists should or could pay to publish a scientific paper. Highly selective open-access journals that reject most of their submitted papers tend to have higher operating expenses, and eLife, which last year accepted 15.4% of submissions, falls into that category.
Patterson notes that the decision to ask for $2,500 puts eLife in the range typically charged by other open-access journals, such as those published by the Public Library of Science. This is however lower than those charged by competitors such as Science Advances ($4,600) and Nature Communications ($5,200).
The journal will still depend on its backers to pay what it terms fixed costs, such as for technology platforms, infrastructure, marketing and other staff. The total publishing cost per article in 2017, eLife estimates, will be around £3,085.
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