eLife has announced that a fee for publication of $2,500 (USD) will take effect for the first time on January 1, 2017. All papers submitted from January 1 will be subject to the fee if they are accepted for publication, although authors with insufficient funding will be eligible for a fee waiver. It has been free to publish in eLife until now. The publication fee is one element of eLife’s long-term financial strategy, which continues to rely on the generous support of three major biomedical research funders: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. For the first five years of our operation, we have used funder support to cover all of our costs, but the strong growth we have experienced in submissions and publications has motivated us to introduce a means to cover a portion of our costs – specifically, the costs that increase in line with our publishing volume. Our approach to publication fees means that we will be able to publish even more great science, and to dedicate more of the funding that we receive in our second five years of operation to services beyond the publication of high-quality research articles. These funder-supported activities include research and development into new open-source products and services to support broader improvements in research communication, and the provision of magazine content and lay summaries for research articles, for example. As part of this panel discussion, we will present a full account of the costs and rate of growth at eLife as well as detail on the fixed and marginal costs of publishing, and how these helped us to arrive at the fee we will charge.

Setting a fee for publication

253rd National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.