The Web of Science, a leading bibliometric indexing service, yesterday suspended the journal eLife from its listings because its novel publishing model adopted last year—which includes public peer review but no final decision on whether a manuscript is accepted or rejected—conflicts with the Web of Science’s standards for assuring quality.
The move could jeopardize eLife’s journal impact factor (IF), the controversial metric—determined annually by Clarivate, the Web of Science’s parent firm, based on average citations to a journal’s papers—that is widely used as a proxy for quality.
Publishing industry veterans had been waiting for the Web of Science’s decision. The suspension was “probably inevitable,” Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and a co-founder of the bioRxiv preprint server, wrote on X (formerly Twitter), because the quality standards applied by Clarivate and eLife> “clearly conflict.”
Still, eLife’s management said it is disappointed by Clarivate’s decision. “[It] stifles attempts to show how publishing and peer review can be improved using open science principles, and instead gives the appearance of ongoing support for established and ineffective publishing models that have needed to change for so long,” they wrote in an online statement. Clarivate has not identified any eLife-reviewed papers as lacking in quality, says Damian Pattinson, the journal’s executive director.
In an emailed statement, Clarivate says it will conduct a review applying its standard quality criteria but already has concerns about the articles published under the new model because eLife’s publication decisions are “decoupled from validation by peer review.” Clarivate’s findings could lead it to remove eLife from its Master Journal List, in which case the journal would no longer receive an annually updated IF. In that event, the Web of Science might still index some content that meets the quality criteria. “We will consider content that has ‘strength of evidence’ described by the journal as ‘solid,’ ‘convincing,’ ‘compelling,’ or ‘exceptional’ but exclude ‘incomplete’ or ‘inadequate,’” its statement says.
The collision course was charted when eLife—a nonprofit, selective, online-only journal focused on the life sciences—instituted its upstart new publishing model in January 2023. Under the fresh approach, the journal maintains what Pattinson calls a rigorous process to determine whether a submission meets the bar to be sent for peer review. Authors of selected papers are charged a fee of $2500. When reviews are received, the journal posts them, unsigned, with a manuscript, regardless of whether they are positive or negative, and they and the article are free to read. If the author revises the paper to address the comments, eLife posts the new version. In addition to the Web of Science, the paper’s final version is also indexed in other scholarly databases such as PubMed and Google Scholar.
Billed as an experiment, eLife’s managers said at the time they hoped the model would alleviate a variety of dysfunctions besetting scientific publication, including long delays and a lack of transparency. Another goal was to challenge the dominance of the IF as a quality marker, which they say is unfit and unreliable for that purpose and fosters an overreliance on a few selective journals with high scores; at the time, eLife’s had a relatively high 6.4 IF. Despite the critiques of the metric, Pattinson said eLife had held discussions with Clarivate since last year arguing for keeping the journal on Clarivate’s Master Journal List. He called Clarivate’s suspension “an overreach,” adding “this feels like an attempt to define the rules of academic publishing, and I have a real concern that a large corporation such as Clarivate is doing that. It feels to me something that should be very much community-led.”
eLife has faced questions about whether it will remain financially viable or drive away scientists. In an update published last year, the journal said more than 90% of authors had chosen its new option from February to July 2023. (The previous, traditional model was still offered then.) Total submissions declined by one-quarter compared with the same span of months in 2022 but nearly reached eLife’s target. Pattinson says growth has been strong this year; the journal plans to release a further update about those trends soon.
