Bringing eLife to life

In June 2011, three of the world's leading research funders - the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust - announced plans to launch an open access journal publishing the most influential research in the life and biomedical sciences. The new journal would be run by a community of active researchers. In addition to driving open access, the key priorities of the publisher, eLife Sciences, were to establish a swift and decisive editorial process, and to explore ways in which digital media can be used to maximum effect in the communication of new research. More broadly, the journal eLife has a mandate to experiment and to be a catalyst for innovation in all aspects of scholarly communication. eLife has now been publishing for just under a year.