eLife as a prestigious publisher in vision science
Lee de-Wit
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eLife was explicitly set up as an open access rival to nature and science for biomedical and life sciences. It is funded directly by the Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. There are no author publication charges. It has a high impact factor, comparable to Current Biology (although it doesn't promote its impact factor). There was a near unanimous agreement at ECVP 2015 discussion that it would be useful to push for eLife as a prestigious publisher in vision science. There are already a number of vision scientists who act as editors (most notably Matteo Carandini and Judy Culham), however its remit only seems to cover traditional neuroscience. If it were to become a more general alternative within vision science, it would need to broaden to include purely behavioural work. Numerous other 'life science' journals (Current Biology, JoN) include purely behavioural work, so presumably eLife could be persuaded to broaden its remit. Probably we need to contact the Editor-in-chief (Randy Schekman) and open a discussion on this.
Simon Rushton · Wed 2 Sep 2015 9:49AM
They do publish behavioural work. See this article as an example.
http://elifesciences.org/content/early/2014/06/14/eLife.03005
Note Dora Angelaki (one of the authors) was also on the editorial board at eLife. She might be a good person to consult first given she is a vision person that does both behavioural and neurophys work.