Open-Access Journal eLife Publishes First Articles

A new open-access journal for science, eLife, has released its first collection of research articles.

The full eLife journal website will go live later this year, but the editors decided to release several compelling submissions, the journal said in a release.

The articles are available at: www.elifesciences.org/articles. Articles also are published on PubMed Central (PMC), the public archive for life and biomedical science literature at the US National Library of Medicine.

The new journal is supported by Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust.

According to the release, study findings include:

· A hormone involved in response to starvation that dramatically increases the lifespan of mice in which it is overexpressed, although further research into side effects is needed (Zhang et al.).

· A critical signaling molecule involved in the interaction between a species of single-celled organisms and bacteria – an important advance in efforts to understand the evolution of multicellularity (Alegado et al.).

· The results of a two-year field trial that demonstrates how a specific group of chemicals released by plants in response to herbivore attack can increase the fitness of the plants in the Darwinian sense of increasing reproductive success (Schuman et al.).

· How cells cope with the stress of poorly folded proteins, and specifically how fission yeast deploys the same cellular machinery as other organisms but in an unusual and very different way (Kimmig et al.).

The journal has compiled high-level summaries, called eLife Digests, for each article.