Did American paleoanthropologist Lee Berger benefit from the scientific publication model proposed by the journal? eLife to present his findings as much more solid than they are? This is the feeling of many specialists in the field, who are not convinced by the evidence supporting his thesis, according to which Homo stara small hominin who lived in South Africa more than two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, is said to have deliberately buried his dead in a cave.
“With Lee Berger, we knew what we were getting intosays plant geneticist Detlef Weigel (Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen, Germany), co-editor-in-chief ofeLife. We had published the first articles on Homo naledi since 2015. But he’s a bit of a showman, we didn’t know he orchestrated this with Netflix and National Geographic.” A documentary featuring him was released on the video-on-demand platform in July 2023, shortly after the manuscripts were published in eLife. A strategy already used in 2015, with the broadcast of a documentary when the original discovery was announced.
However, Detlef Weigel says: “very happy” for publishing these articles, which drew attention to the model thateLife attempts to promote, through a more transparent evaluation of manuscripts than that of the major scientific journals. These do not systematically publish the reviews (arguments of the proofreaders) leading to acceptance or rejection, sometimes after long delays, of the manuscripts submitted to them. An opaque right of life and death with which eLife intends to break away, by choosing to have articles already put online on preprint servers publicly evaluated.
Open evaluation
Detlef Weigel acknowledges that the media are not familiar with this new practice, and that they may have partly missed the reviews who pointed out the inadequacy of Lee Berger’s data. But he notes that these criticisms posted online by eLife were consulted more (28,665 page views as of August 8) than the articles themselves (13,251 page views). “We have given the scientific community the means to quickly and transparently deliver its opinion on Lee Berger’s work”defends neuroscientist Timothy Behrens (University of Oxford), who is also in the management ofeLife.
If Lee Berger was able to take advantage ofeLifethe “victim” was consenting: in a recent editorial, the journal, created twelve years ago, claims to have chosen certain controversial studies, in order to highlight the interest of an open evaluation. With a few safeguards, insists Detlef Weigel: there is no question of putting forward hypotheses that are potentially harmful to public health, for example.
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