Mark Ware recently asked me some questions about the state of web scale annotation, based on my impressions from the recent iannotate conference (at which I gave a short talk on the idea of research threads) What is the eLife view of annotation systems? We like the fact that there is now a W3C standard for Open Annotations (OA). We are encouraged that so many projects out there are looking to make their annotations interoperable ...continue reading.

**Deadline for entries is June 15, 2013 eLife is proud to sponsor the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) – a new effort from Google, PLOS and the Wellcome Trust to recognize uses of open-access research that have led to innovations that benefit society – in any field. ASAP will showcase individuals who have used, applied or remixed open-access scientific research to make a difference for science, medicine, business, technology or society as a whole.  Potential ...continue reading.

By Sian Roderick - You’ve had your manuscript accepted and have been told that your article has been sent for typesetting.  What happens next?  In the normal run of things the files are sent to the typesetter and come out the other end as a beautifully typeset PDF, along with other outputs like XML and HTML. In the past galley proofs were posted to the authors and they were asked to mark their corrections using ...continue reading.

Last week we rolled out an update to the tools available for managing references and citations from eLife article pages. We now have distinct options to “Download”, “Open” and “Share” the reference to the article. You can browse our recent articles to see the feature in action. The “Download” options allow you to save the reference to your desktop in any of the most popular formats available. The “Share” option allows you to post a link ...continue reading.

This statement was prepared with Prabhat Jha, eLife senior editor for epidemiology.  eLife enthusiastically supports AllTrials’ call for all clinical trials to be registered and reported, and encourages other scientific journals to sign the petition as well. The last decade has seen a revolution in open-access publishing of scientific articles to audiences as wide as possible.  eLife is dedicated to advancing scientific excellence and also access to the best science.  In this spirit, AllTrials’ efforts ...continue reading.

By Stephen Curry The world of academia is in ferment over open access — the idea of making research articles freely available to everyone. Open access is widely believed to be “a good thing” but no-one is quite sure how to bring it about. From April 1st this year anyone in receipt of public funding from one of the UK research councils will be required to publish their findings by an open access route. The new policy ...continue reading.

It has been a busy week for open access. So what is open access? The basic idea is that most scientific research is paid for by governments using money from tax payers, so it is only fair that these tax payers – and GPs and charities and small companies and others – should be able to read the results of the research they have paid for, without having to pay for it again – which ...continue reading.

By Elizabeth Robinson After a decade of growth, the open-access movement in scientific publishing still hasn’t overthrown the traditional model of paid content and subscription-based access, but new initiatives continue to try. The latest entrant, which launched December 13, 2012, is a collaboration of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Society called eLife. On Thursday, U.S. News and World Report managing editor Simon Owens looked into the prospects of the fledgling open-access journal, whose ...continue reading.

By Randy Schekman - Dear colleagues, In June 2011, three of the most prestigious research funding bodies in the world came together in a collaboration to inspire change in the communication of scientific discoveries. The first product of this collaboration is an open-access journal for the most influential research in life science and biomedicine, which will be a platform for increasing the quality of peer review and showing how technology can be used to enhance the ...continue reading.

By Ian Mulvany, Head of technology - Starting to make the most of the web. Today we launch our journal web site. You can check it out at elife.elifesciences.org. In building this site our goal is to create a great experience for reading research online, one that makes the most of what the web has to offer. The launch of the site today represents a first step in that direction and I’d like to give ...continue reading.