UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works

Title Progress and promise.

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4g24r8jx

Author Schekman, Randy

Publication Date 2019-01-23

DOI 10.7554/elife.44799

Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California EDITORIAL

SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING Progress and promise As he prepares to step down as the Editor-in-Chief of eLife, reflects on the origins of the journal, the eLife approach to , and current challenges in scientific publishing.

RANDYSCHEKMAN

n December 2010 the Howard Hughes Medi- the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci- I cal Institute (HHMI), the ences (PNAS), and had been prepared to stay and the invited leading fig- for a second term. However, Robert Tjian, my ures in the and biomedical sciences to a colleague at UC Berkeley and president of HHMI meeting at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus at the time, urged me to consider leading this to consider the creation of a new open-access new effort. I was intrigued by the possibility of journal that would publish outstanding research this new venture, particularly given its solid in these fields. Many of those present expressed financial foundation and the opportunity of start- impatience with the delays and difficulties they ing afresh. Harold Varmus, then director of the had experienced in publishing what they consid- National Cancer Institute, advised that a new ered to be excellent work in the pages of three journal would have to do something different in journals: Cell, and . order to distinguish it from other journals in the , the director of the Wellcome evolving publishing landscape. Thus, when Trust at the time, memorably remarked that offered the position, I accepted with enthusiasm "the process of science peer review needs to be and took Varmus’s sage advice to "think owned by professional scientists" in order to different" to heart. curtail the "endless iterations of nit-picking" that were common during peer review at the most selective journals (Jump, 2011). The consensus Setting up eLife was that the business plans of these journals My first steps were to appoint two Deputy Edi- were based on exclusivity, overseen by the tors ( and Detlef Weigel), a team of teams of professional editors who made all the Senior Editors who were all active scientists in decisions about manuscripts at these journals, the major areas of the life sciences, and a man- and an overreliance on the Journal Impact ager for the editorial office (Mark Patterson). At Factor. a meeting in New York in December 2011 we The situation was particularly toxic for early- agreed on a peer-review process for the journal. career researchers, who felt that they had to All new submissions would be assigned to a publish in one of these journals in order to Senior Editor, who would decide (often in con- secure a permanent research position (Schek- sultation with a member of our soon-to-be man, 2013). Although questions were asked established Board of Reviewing Editors) whether about the need for yet another journal, there or not to invite a full submission that would be Copyright Schekman. This article was support for the idea of a selective journal sent to referees for full peer review: this initial is distributed under the terms of the where working scientists, rather than profes- decision is taken by professional editors at the Creative Commons Attribution sional editors, would take all the editorial most selective journals. License, which permits unrestricted Thinking about ways to improve the peer- use and redistribution provided that decisions. the original author and source are At the time of the meeting I was coming to review process for manuscripts that survive this credited. the end of a five-year term as Editor-in-Chief of initial stage, I recalled how editorial staff at

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One of my goals had been to make revisions agreed by the Reviewing Editor and the reviewers during the consultation (such as the peer-review process more open requests for extra experimental data or further and constructive analysis) and a list of minor revisions; ii) extra experiments are only requested if they are essential to support the major claims in the man- uscript and can be completed within two months; iii) in most cases the revised manuscript PNAS were able to consult with one another is assessed by just the Reviewing Editor, rather online as submissions moved through the peer- than sending it back to all the reviewers: this, review process, so we agreed that eLife editors combined with our practice of only requesting and reviewers should discuss a manuscript and essential revisions, helps to speed up the publi- their reports on it before reaching a consensus cation process. decision. This consultation – which is overseen Other important aspects of the eLife peer- by the Reviewing Editor who is handling the review process include: there is no target accep- manuscript – has become a central element of tance rate for eLife – editors accept all the the eLife peer-review process: once the last papers that reach the standard we expect (by report has been received, each reviewer receives contrast, the acceptance rates of the most selec- an email asking them to read and comment on tive journals are still largely constrained by page the other reports (which include the name of budgets); there is no limit on the length of each reviewer). If the reviewers broadly support papers – authors can have as many words and publication, they agree on the revisions that figures as they need; and the decision letter and need to be made in order for the manuscript to the authors’ response to this letter are published be accepted. This is a significant change to the with the paper, along with the names of those standard approach because the reviewers, in referees who are happy for their identities to be collaboration with the editor, focus on identify- made public. Unlike the most selective journals, ing the most important revisions for the author. eLife is not in the business of selling magazines In addition, the consultation allows the reviewers or subscriptions. Instead, our editors are to learn from each other and, if necessary, to selected for their expertise, and they are encour- revise their views on a manuscript in the light of aged to accept for publication those papers that comments from reviewers who might know combine true scholarship and responsible more about a particular topic or technique. behavior, rather than identifying papers on the One of my goals had been to make the peer- latest fads that may help to increase our impact review process more open and constructive: factor. We have opposed the use of the impact over the years I felt that peer review had factor since day one because we feel it is mean- become somewhat toxic and destructive, with ingless, particularly when it is used to assess reviewers taking advantage of the veil of ano- individual papers or scientists (and it is regretta- nymity to make more and more unnecessarily ble that so many scientists seem to be in thrall negative comments about the papers they were to this number). reviewing. In the eLife process reviewers know that they will have to defend their views in an open discussion with the other reviewers before Launch and rapid growth an editorial decision is rendered on a manu- By the time we opened for submissions in June script, and I am convinced that this has fostered 2012 we had 15 Senior Editors (excluding Detlef, a more positive approach to peer review, and Fiona and myself) and 175 Reviewing Editors, am pleased to see that a number of other jour- and by the end of 2012 we had published 27 nals have experimented with similar approaches Research Articles. Fast forward to the present (King, 2017). and we received 7671 submissions in 2018 and It is worth emphasizing three other points published over 1250 research papers (in the about the eLife approach to peer review: i) in form of Research Articles, Short Reports, the case of a positive decision the individual ref- Research Advances and Tools and Resources eree reports are normally not sent to the papers). We now have over 340 Reviewing Edi- authors: rather authors are sent a detailed deci- tors, 43 Senior Editors and three Deputy Editors sion letter that contains a list of the essential (Eve Marder became a Deputy Editor in 2015,

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organizations on a variety of projects, such as the DORA campaign "to improve the ways in We have opposed the use of the which the outputs of scholarly research are eval- uated". And many eLife papers have a plain-lan- since day one because guage summary (called a digest) that explains we feel it is meaningless, the content and context of the paper for the general reader (King et al., 2017). particularly when it is used to assess Although open-access journals continue to individual papers or scientists. increase their share of the market for research papers, progress has been slower than hoped for as the large commercial publishers and some scientific societies with substantial publishing operations have resisted, usually to protect their and Anna Akhmanova replaced Fiona Watt in substantial profit margins (which go to share- 2018). holders at commercial publishers or are used to We are also committed to improving both fund activities unrelated to publishing at socie- the gender and geographical balance among ties). Fortunately, the ground is now shifting rap- our Editors: this is important to us because an idly, most notably with a far-reaching proposal analysis of all submissions to eLife between 2012 in Europe called Plan S. A variety of other organ- and 2017 found that "women and authors from izations, including my own beloved libraries of nations outside of North America and Europe the University of California, are also pushing for were underrepresented both as gatekeepers change. The overall goal is to oblige journals (editors and peer reviewers) and last that rely on a subscription model, and more authors" (Murray et al., 2018). Sadly, this con- importantly the commercial journals that extract clusion is consistent with what has been found at their profit from the free labor provided by aca- other journals (see, for example, Helmer et al., demics, to find a satisfactory business plan to 2017; Lerback and Hanson, 2017). survive the future. Given the generous support we received Another positive development in scientific from our funders, we did not charge a publica- publishing over the past few years has been the tion fee until the end of 2016. However, as we growth of servers in the life and bio- knew we would eventually have to go it alone, medical sciences, notably bioRxiv, which allow we introduced a publication fee of $2500 per researchers to make their results available as paper in January 2017. The fee was set at this quickly and as widely as possible. A number of level to cover our marginal publication costs, journals had been exploring new approaches to with the funds we receive from HHMI, the Max scientific publishing before the launch of eLife, Planck Society, Wellcome and the Knut and Alice notably journals published by BMC, BMJ, EMBO Wallenberg Foundation largely being used to and PLOS, and this spirit of innovation has con- support fixed publishing costs and the develop- tinued with these publishers and others: exam- ment of our journal infrastructure (please see ples include the development of the Open Setting a fee for publication for further details). Research publishing platform by F1000Research In addition to peer review, I am pleased that (Rodgers, 2018), and an increase in the number eLife has been innovative in other ways. For of journals publishing referee reports and other example, we established an Early-Career Advi- information about the peer-review process sory Group in 2014 to act as a "voice for early- (Polka et al., 2018). And at eLife we are cur- career researchers within eLife", appointed an rently analyzing the results of a trial in which, for early-career researcher to our Board of Directors papers that are sent for peer review, authors in January 2018, and have launched several ini- decide how to respond to the issues raised by tiatives to increase the number of early-career the reviewers (Patterson and Schekman, 2018). researchers who review manuscripts for the jour- Looking ahead, I see several challenges and nal. In collaboration with the Center for Open opportunities for eLife. One is for the journal to Science, we are publishing the results of the continue to grow and to continue to advocate Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, an ini- for change in peer review and scientific publish- tiative to explore the reproducibility of preclini- ing more generally, both individually and as part cal research in cancer biology, and to identify of organizations such as DORA. Another is to the factors that influence reproducibility more continue to build an end-to-end open-source generally. We have also worked with other platform for scientific publishing. We have

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started to build a submission and peer-review Randy Schekman is the Editor-in-Chief of eLife platform in collaboration with a number of other [email protected] like-minded organizations, and are also in the https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8615-6409 process of adapting our publishing platform so Competing interests: Randy Schekman: Receives that it can be used by other journals and publish- funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. ers. The hope is that this platform could be Published 23 January 2019 adopted by society publishers and other non- profits to reduce their costs, and thus reduce References their reliance on the income from journal sub- Helmer M, Schottdorf M, Neef A, Battaglia D. 2017. scriptions. I see this as a crucial development as Gender bias in . eLife 6:e21718. it will help societies and non-profits survive in an DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21718, PMID: 2 environment that is dominated by the large 8322725 Jump P. 2011. New journal, all-new rules. Times commercial publishers and societies with sub- Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation. stantial publishing operations. com/news/research/research-intelligence-new-journal- all-new-rules/416701.article [Accessed January 5, 2019]. A personal note King SRF. 2017. Consultative review is worth the wait. Although I am enormously gratified by the suc- eLife 6:32012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife. cess and future promise of eLife, I decided to 32012 step down for personal reasons. My wife of 44 King SRF, Pewsey E, Shailes S. 2017. An inside guide to eLife digests. eLife 6:25410. DOI: https://doi.org/ years died in September 2017 of complications 10.7554/eLife.25410 from Parkinson’s Disease. At the time of her Lerback J, Hanson B. 2017. Journals invite too few death, I had been in casual conversation with a women to referee. Nature 541:455–457. DOI: https:// representative of the Sergey Brin Family Founda- doi.org/10.1038/541455a, PMID: 28128272 tion, which has generously supported research Murray D, Siler K, Larivie´re V, Chan WM, Collings AM, Raymond J, Sugimoto CR. 2018. Gender and on Parkinson’s Disease. When my wife died, I international diversity improves equity in peer review. was asked by the Brin Foundation to chair an bioRxiv. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/ effort to identify and support key elements of 08/29/400515. basic research focused on understanding the ori- Patterson M, Schekman R. 2018. A new twist on peer gin(s) and mechanism(s) of disease progression, review. eLife 7:e36545. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/ eLife.36545, PMID: 29944117 and I am now helping to build an international Polka JK, Kiley R, Konforti B, Stern B, Vale RD. 2018. network of Parkinson’s Disease geneticists, cell Publish peer reviews. Nature 560:545–547. and molecular biologists, neuroscientists and DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06032-w, physicians to tackle this scourge. Our goal is to PMID: 30158621 advance our basic understanding as an essential Rodgers P. 2018. Decisions, decisions. eLife 6:e32011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.32011 prelude to the development of new drugs and Schekman R. 2013. How journals like Nature, Cell and surgical procedures. I am eager to take on this Science are damaging science. The Guardian. https:// challenge and am grateful to the Brin Founda- www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/ tion for helping to turn my personal grief into how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage- something constructive. scienceJanuary 2, 2019].

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