Open-access journal eLife gets £25-million boost; Nature, 6/1/16

Ewen Callaway, Nature; Open-access journal eLife gets £25-million boost:

"When three of the world’s biggest private biomedical funders launched the journal eLife in 2012, they wanted to shake up the way in which scientists published their top papers. The new journal would be unashamedly elitist, competing with biology’s traditional ‘big three’, Nature, Science and Cell, to publish the best work. But unlike these, eLife would use working scientists as editors, and it would be open access. And with backers providing £18 million (US$26 million) over five years, authors wouldn’t need to pay anything to publish there.

Four years and more than 1,800 publications later, eLife’s funders — the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the Wellcome Trust in London and the Max Planck Society in Berlin — announced on 1 June that they will continue their support. They will back the non-profit eLife organization with a further £25 million between 2017 and 2022 (see ‘eLife by the numbers’)."