The journal eLife will no longer receive a journal impact factor, the much-debated metric that many scientists view as a badge of quality, the analytics firm Clarivate announced today. Clarivate, which operates the influential Web of Science database, said a review determined the journal’s novel publishing model adopted in January 2023—which includes public peer review but no final decision on whether a manuscript is accepted or rejected—does not meet its standards for peer review.
The decision could put eLife’s financial viability at stake, says Randy Schekman, the journal’s founding editor, who left its editorial board after opposing the new publishing model. The open-access journal charges authors whose manuscripts it reviews $2500 each, a key source of revenue. “Not that I give a damn about impact factor, but … its sudden withdrawal will precipitate a drop in submissions,” he says. Many institutions evaluate their scholars for promotion based on the impact factors of journals in which they publish, and other journals that have lost their impact factor—which is based on average citations to a journal’s papers—have subsequently published fewer articles.
An eLife spokesperson said the journal was not ready to comment on Clarivate’s decision. But last month, after Clarivate suspended eLife from Web of Science, Executive Director Damian Pattinson said it would be “wild speculation” to say its submissions might decline if it lost its impact factor. He also called Clarivate’s review an “overreach” and its journal impact factor “a very corrosive metric, one that we’ve never supported or publicized.”
A stalwart backer of eLife’s experiment has been the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Clarivate’s decision does not change that, said Bodo Stern, HHMI’s chief of strategic initiatives. “We do believe the Web of Science decision stymies innovation in publishing because it disadvantages publishing models that make the peer-review process more transparent,” he added. HHMI has also been among eLife’s chief funders, providing an undisclosed annual subsidy to the journal, whose revenues from publication fees paid by authors have not exceeded expenses since it was founded.
Clarivate’s decision to stop issuing an impact factor for eLife had been expected by publishing industry insiders. In a statement last month, Clarivate said it was reviewing eLife’s model because the journal’s publication decisions are “decoupled from validation by peer review.” eLife publishes every manuscript it sends out for peer review regardless of whether the reviewer comments are positive or negative; the reviews are then posted with the article, which are free to read. eLife editors also characterize the article’s strength of evidence.
Manuscripts the editors designate as “incomplete” or “inadequate” still appear under the eLife banner, and Clarivate found this unacceptable, it indicated in an email to Science today explaining its decision. Clarivate said it will continue to index eLife articles that the journal’s editors designate as “solid” or better. But the journal, which has a relatively high impact factor, 6.4, will lose it when Clarivate releases updated ones for all journals in June 2025.
When eLife was founded in 2012, supporters hoped to build it into a rare instance of a selective, open-access journal that could compete for quality submissions with top-ranked titles such as Cell, Nature, and Science. But Clarivate’s decision appears likely to feed an ongoing debate about the merits of eLife’s new model, which was designed as an experiment to address widely acknowledged weaknesses in journal practices, including publication delays.
Critics of the new publishing model say the loss of the impact factor is but one of several negative outcomes it has produced, citing anecdotal reports of subpar papers eLife published. Among the critics is Schekman, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013. He bases his critique in part on an experiment with a version of the new publishing model conducted in 2018 when he was still the journal’s editor-in-chief. “I found authors who just didn’t care what the reviewers said and who, in spite of very serious criticism, were insistent on their work being published. I didn’t see the point of that.”
He stepped down from the helm in 2019 to pursue other interests but remained on the editorial board. After the new model debuted, he says he signed a petition circulated by some other board members protesting the new model. Citing the petition, eLife’s management asked him to resign from the board, which he did.
In an interview last month, Pattinson insisted the new model does ensure quality. In a review of the model’s first year of operation, eLife found that the terms used by reviewers and editors to describe the manuscripts’ significance and their strength of evidence indicate that the quality of submissions under the new model has been similar to that of the previous model. As of January, the number of submissions had held roughly steady since the experiment started, and the percentage of manuscripts chosen by editors to undergo peer review, about 27%, was also comparable to the previous model’s. (The new model was not in place long enough to have influenced its impact factor released by Clarivate in June; the factor is based on citations during the previous 2 years.)
Elaborating last month, eLife spokesperson Emily Packer said, “A journal name or its impact factor says little about the quality of any individual research article.” She added, “Articles labeled ‘incomplete’ or ‘inadequate’ by our editors go on to be accepted in other Web of Science–indexed journals by a different set of editors with no indication of methodological shortcomings.” The open nature of eLife’s model “is better for science than a closed system where editors make decisions without accountability.”
eLife’s model ultimately leaves it up to readers to evaluate a paper’s merits based on its text and accompanying peer reviews, because of the absence of an “accept” or “reject” decision by editors. But Schekman calls that “wishful thinking” and says the editors’ decision helps readers. “Who has the time [to read that content]? We’re flooded with information.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/web-science-index-plans-end-elife-s-journal-impact-factor
