eLife is not a conventional journal, and that is the whole point. Founded in 2012 by three of the world's largest biomedical research funders - the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and Wellcome - and later joined by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, eLife was set up as a non-profit experiment in how life-sciences publishing could work. Since January 2023 it has run a publish-review-curate (PRC) model: eLife no longer makes accept/reject decisions after peer review. Instead, every paper it agrees to review is published as a Reviewed Preprint alongside the public peer reviews and a concise editorial evaluation called an eLife Assessment.

This guide explains how the model works in practice, what it costs, what happens to indexing and metrics under the new system, and how to submit.

The eLife process combines the speed of preprints with the scrutiny of expert peer review:

1. You submit a manuscript that is (or will be) posted as a preprint - directly, or by transferring from bioRxiv or medRxiv.
2. Editors decide whether to review. This is the only gate. eLife's editors - all working scientists - select papers they expect to be influential in the life sciences and medicine. Many submissions are declined at this stage without a fee.
3. Public review. If sent for review, the paper is peer reviewed consultatively, and eLife publishes a Reviewed Preprint: the manuscript, the full public reviews, and an eLife Assessment that rates the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence using a common vocabulary (from "landmark" and "compelling" down to "incomplete" or "inadequate").
4. You respond and revise as you see fit. Revised versions receive updated reviews and an updated assessment - or you can stop at any version.
5. Version of Record (optional). When you are done revising, you can ask eLife to produce a final, citable Version of Record (VOR).

There is no "rejected after review" outcome. The assessment, not a binary decision, tells readers what editors and reviewers think of the work.

eLife covers the full span of the life sciences and medicine - from biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience, and genetics to ecology, evolution, epidemiology, and clinical research. Article types include:

Since launch, eLife has published more than 22,000 articles, and in recent years it has handled roughly 2,700-2,900 new papers per year.

eLife is 100% Gold open access: everything is published under a CC BY licence, immediately free to read, with no subscription option and immediate green self-archiving permitted.

• **Publication fee: $3,750** for submissions from July 1, 2026 (it was$3,000 before that, and $2,000 when the new model launched in 2023 - always check the current fee page). The fee is charged at the point eLife commits to peer reviewing the work, and it covers everything: initial evaluation, peer review, publication of the Reviewed Preprint and all revised versions, and the Version of Record. If the fee is invoiced to an individual rather than an institution, 20% VAT is added.
• Waivers: eLife grants full waivers for authors without sufficient funds - due to geography, career stage, grant termination, or field. Requests are handled case-by-case, treated confidentially, and are never visible to editors or reviewers.
• Publishing agreements: a number of institutions and funders have agreements with eLife under which they pay the fee on behalf of affiliated authors - check eLife's publishing-agreements page before you pay out of pocket.

The new model changed how indexers treat eLife, and you should know the current state before submitting:

• Web of Science: after placing eLife "on hold" in October 2024, Clarivate moved to partial indexing in December 2024 - Versions of Record whose eLife Assessment is "solid" or above (about 93% of papers) are indexed in the Core Collection, while the small minority assessed "incomplete" or "inadequate" are not. As a partially indexed journal, eLife no longer receives a Journal Impact Factor (its last JIF, for 2023, was 6.4).
• Scopus: eLife content moved from the Scopus Journals Collection to the Scopus Preprints Collection.
• Unchanged: all eLife papers remain indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central, DOAJ, Google Scholar, and OpenAlex.

Whether this matters depends on your institution: if your evaluation committee requires an Impact Factor, factor that in; if it values open review and article-level assessment, eLife's model is arguably richer than a journal-level metric.

• Who reviews: eLife's editorial board consists of working research scientists; reviews are consultative, with reviewers and editors discussing the paper before the public reviews are finalized.
• What is published: the individual public reviews, the eLife Assessment (using eLife's controlled vocabulary for significance and strength of evidence), and - if you choose - your author response.
• Timeline: your preprint is public immediately; the Reviewed Preprint with its assessment typically follows within a few months of being sent for review.

1. Post or plan a preprint. eLife reviews preprints - you can transfer directly from bioRxiv or medRxiv, or eLife staff can help post one.
2. Prepare your manuscript. eLife is format-flexible at first submission; use the eLife template on SciSpace to get structure, author-date citations, and reference formatting right.
3. Submit via eLife's submission system (built on eJournalPress) at elifesciences.org.
4. Editorial triage. Editors decide whether to send the paper for public review - no fee is charged if they decline.
5. Review, revise, finish. Respond to the public reviews, publish revised versions when ready, and request the Version of Record when you are done.

eLife is a member of COPE, OASPA, and STM, and follows COPE guidance on corrections and retractions. It has strong data-availability requirements: authors must share the data underlying their findings via appropriate repositories (Dryad, Dataverse, OSF, or discipline-specific archives), with a data-availability statement in every paper. Competing interests must be declared by authors, editors, and reviewers, and the public nature of eLife's reviews adds an extra layer of accountability to the process.