@MatteoCarandini

eLife’s desk reject consists of a senior editor consulting with 2 or 3 reviewing editors—all practicing scientists. And the rate of desk reject has remained the same as before. I am not sure what the news are?

To further add: publication is not at all before peer review. Rather, upon receiving the reviews, it’s the authors’ choice whether to go ahead and publish as is or to address the reviewers’ comments and request another round of review. In the old model, and in most journals, it’s the editor who decides. At eLife, the reviewing editor writes an assessment that captures the evaluation on the strength of evidence and the significance of findings using a controlled vocabulary. If the assessment is positive, great; if less good than expected or plain bad, would the authors like to have that attached to the paper, or revise instead? Their choice.

#eLife #ScientificPublishing

“Generative network modeling reveals quantitative definitions of bilateral symmetry exhibited by a whole insect brain connectome”, Pedigo et al. 2023 https://elifesciences.org/articles/83739

“This important work demonstrates a significant asymmetry between the connectivity statistics of the left and right hemispheres of the Drosophila larva brain. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling and represents a first step toward the development of statistical tests for comparing pairs of connectomes more generally.”

#connectomics #Drosophila #DrosophilaLarva #brain #neuroscience #eLife

"Functional cell types in the mouse superior colliculus", Li & Meister 2023 at #eLife @eLife

"we recorded from mouse superficial SC neurons under a battery of visual stimuli including those used for classification of RGCs [retinal ganglion cells]. An unsupervised clustering algorithm identified 24 functional types based on their visual responses."

"Compared to the retina, the visual representation in the SC has lower dimensionality, consistent with a sifting process along the visual pathway."

https://elifesciences.org/articles/82367

#neuroscience #mouse #SuperiorColliculus #vision #twophoton

@eLife

For anyone on the fence about #eLife's new publishing model, note there is no such thing as an "eLife paper", since the purpose of the review process in scientific publishing is to provide accurate, constructive reviews to authors. In modern times, dissemination doesn't depend on mailed-in printed periodicals.

Each eLife publication has an evaluation attached to it in the form of an assessment–be it negative or positive. Critically, authors decide whether to go forward with assessments as they are and go public, or to revise the manuscript and request re-review to improve both manuscript and, consequently, the reviews and assessment.

In other words, nothing changed, except, its authors who decide how to move forward with their own manuscript, rather than editors.

#ScientificPublishing #academia

Today @eLife has reached 1,000 manuscript submissions using the new model, Reviewed Preprints https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review

See all published Reviewed Preprints https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints

Within themes, #eLife makes no distinction between old-style articles (where editors decided whether a manuscript is accepted) and reviewed preprints (where authors decide instead). Keep in mind both have the reviews attached, including as of recently a brief assessment paragraph summarizing, with a controlled vocabulary, the significance of findings and, more importantly, the strength of evidence.

See the subset of #eLife publications tagged as #neuroscience https://elifesciences.org/subjects/neuroscience

#ScientificPublishing #academia #eLife

@nicolaromano

Spot on.

To further add: presently, scientific evaluation for grants, recruitment and career promotion is entangled with paper publishing: everybody claims not to have enough time to read the papers and instead use the journal name as proxy.

Now with #eLife there is a one-paragraph assessment that distils with some controlled vocabulary what the reviewers, reviewing editor and senior editor--4 or 5 experts in the field--thought of the work, on two axes: strength of evidence (accuracy) and significance of findings (impact).

What's not to like!

Disclosure: I'm a senior editor at eLife - @eLife
#academia #ScientificPublishing #ReviewedPreprints

I have been considering publishing my next article in #elife
I was not very convinced by their new #publishing method, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.

What convinced me is that I think of the way I review papers myself. I won't ever reject a paper unless there is something majorly wrong e.g. from an ethical point of view. Instead, I would rather spend time and give constructive and realistic feedback to improve the study.

This is because of two reasons:

1. If the study idea/methodology etc, is good but maybe is missing some key experiment, I think that the authors must have put a lot of effort, time and money into producing this. I have been through the "your work is not fancy enough for our prestigious journal" crap enough times that I will not engage in that. Ever. There is no reason your paper should not publish negative results if the study is well done.
Also, people's jobs and mental health depend on that, which is way more important.
Also, there are plenty of papers in "fancy journals" that are just piles of bs, so I really won't buy into shiny names (I have just spent an entire day trying to run code from several papers published in high-IF journals to no avail...).

2. If the study is poor, it is easy to say: "This is cr*p, straight reject". This just means the authors will submit elsewhere, hoping the next reviewer won't be bothered reading the paper in depth and will let it through. Even worse, this plays into the hands of #predatory journals. I would rather say this can be accepted after all of these major revisions.
The authors get useful feedback on how to improve their study; they might choose not to act on it, but at least I have made my part.

I would be interested in hearing other views on this.

#publishing #peerreview #science

@eLife

Answers to questions about #eLife’s new #ScientificPublishing model, above.

#science #academia #journals #publishing

When life feels good in Yorkshire, I like to wear this t-shirt and pronounce it as @mbeisen never intended #eLife #eeeeeeLife

@Elisa you sound like you'd have a very interesting take on the new #eLife model 😁

What do you think of a system where you pay a full APC just to get the peer review done, but then afterwards you can finalize whenever? Of course... with an editors' assessment tacked onto your article front and centre summarizing the peer review and their feelings on the article.

@neuroamyo @NicoleCRust @neuralreckoning
The editorial summaries #eLife places onto the articles ought to address the “too long, didn’t read” problem you refer to.
I find it hard to envision how #eLife could implement this radical (necessary) change any other way. The unpredictability of journal fate over the long-term is indeed problematic for early career scientists with the current incentives, but this applies to any journal (e.g. society journal takeovers or Nature X rebranding).

--> #Elsevier, l'altro gigante dell'editoria scientifica, invece li bandisce del tutto. Ma secondo la rivista #eLife, è impensabile bloccarne l'uso. La cosa importante, almeno per ora, è che i ricercatori si assumano la responsabilità delle informazioni generate. ChatGpt non è infatti in grado di distinguere le informazioni vere da quelle false e quelle impor- tanti da quelle secondarie.

#machinelearning

Nine publishers just expressed their "full support" for the new White House #OSTP guidelines for federal agency #openaccess policies.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/975032

"Our main message is simple: publishing in any journal published by this group already meets or exceeds the requirements outlined in the OSTP memo."

The signatory publishers are #Copernicus Publications, #eLife, #Frontiers, #JMIR Publications, #MDPI, Open Library of Humanities (#OLH), #PeerJ, #PLOS, and #Ubiquity Press.

(1/3) Neuronal reactivation and replay in the #hippocampus is important for #learning and #memory. So does reactivation induce or modulate synaptic plasticity? We think it does! This is a video abstract made with #blender of our recent paper in #elife.
For higher quality video watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v93Ci-koiNY

Interesting discussion on the new type of #peerreview being started by #eLife and how academics are responding to it:
https://ecoevo.social/@jkpritch/109525726729763807

Interesting discussion on the new type of #peerreview being started by #eLife and how academics are responding to it:
https://ecoevo.social/@jkpritch/109525726729763807

Good read on the new journal #Elife, that is helping speed to publish with a unique form of #peerReview. A peer review for the 21st century
#AcademicPublishing #academia #AcademicMastodon

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science-news/revolution-in-peer-review/

I still struggle to understand the advantages of submitting to the new #elife reviewing platform instead of #reviewcommons

" To test the hypothesis that cephalopod limbs evolved by recruitment of an ancient gene regulatory network for appendage development that is conserved across Bilateria, we investigated arm and tentacle development in embryos of the cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis."

#Evolution #EvoDevo #elife

https://elifesciences.org/articles/43828

'In a cleverly designed experiment, Galvez-Pol et al. used electrocardiography to record the cardiac activity of participants while they performed a simple tactile discrimination task. Without looking, the participants had to figure out whether the objects they touched had vertical or horizontal grooves. They found that touches initiated during systole were held for longer than touches initiated during diastole'

#neuroscience #elife

https://elifesciences.org/articles/84298