Research funders including the Wellcome trust, National Institutes of Health, Research Councils UK, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have policies to require open access to the research they fund. Publishing with eLife automatically ensures you’ve satisfied what they want.

eLife is an open-access publication. All results will be available to a worldwide audience, for free, immediately on publication. And, everyone will have the right to use results without restriction (using a Creative Commons-Attribution license). Citing, downloading, re-using, reproducing, re-purposing, and building on material published in eLife may all be done without requesting permission from the author or the publisher, provided full attribution to the author is given. We’ll also deposit all content into PubMed Central.

Open access means that results are available without barriers to all who could benefit from them.

Colleagues, funders, collaborators, and reviewers will have free access to published works – no fee or log in required. Researchers in other disciplines, in all corners of the world, will discover works online and be able to access and read the full report immediately. Policy makers, small businesses, influencers (such as patient advocates) and the general public will have open access and the opportunity to readily evaluate the potential relevance of individual reports to policy changes, innovations, health care, and more. Open access maximises the potential influence of key discoveries, and drives scientific and economic development.