eLife: Setting a fee for publication

To support the long-term growth eLife is going to introduce a publication fee of $2500 for all research papers submitted on or after January 1, 2017 that go on to be accepted for publication.

On September 29, eLife has announced that a fee for publication of $2,500 (USD) will take effect 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.

The publication fee is one element of eLife’s long-term financial strategy, which continues to rely on the generous support of 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." explains Mar Patterson, eLife's Executive Director in a blog post. "eLife’s publication fee of $2,500 is based on our marginal costs and will help us to become a more scalable publishing operation. In this way, we help ensure that more authors will have the chance to benefit from the eLife editorial process, and that we can publish as much science that satisfies the standards set by the eLife editors as we receive."