The senior editorial team has been named for eLife, the new open-access research journal scheduled for launch in 2012 with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust.
The team includes internationally-renowned, active researchers from Europe, North America and Asia. They will operate independently of the founding organisations and will ensure fair, swift and high-quality editorial decisions.
Editor-in-chief Randy Schekman and managing executive editor Mark Patterson will be joined by deputy editors, Fiona Watt, currently at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Detlef Weigel from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tubingen, Germany. They will be supported by around 15-20 senior editors - researchers who represent a broad range of biomedical and life science research fields.
The announcement to support the new journal was made in June by the three scientific organisations. The initial goals of the journal are open-access publication of highly significant research; high-quality editorial decision-making by an independent team of active, practicing scientists; and a rapid and cutting-edge publishing process.
Over the next few months, the senior editorial team will identify around 150 experts to serve as members of a board of reviewing editors. One of the specific goals of the editorial process is to provide authors with a decision letter that integrates the reviewers' comments and clearly identifies points that need to be addressed for successful acceptance. The overall aims are to speed up the review process, provide explicit and coherent advice to authors and reduce the often unnecessary and burdensome requests that come from multiple disparate critiques.
eLife will seek to publish all research considered to be highly influential in its potential to advance our understanding, to drive a field forward, or in its real-world outcomes. The editorial team will assess submissions efficiently and fairly on the basis of their intrinsic merits. The first issue of the journal is expected late next year. The journal will utilise the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY 3.0) so that the content can be shared and used without restriction.
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