The Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) publishing landscape is undergoing a revolution with the increasing adoption of Open Access policies by funding bodies. Open Access is a cousin of the Open Software movement in which research (which is often paid for by the taxpayer) is made available under permissive licences such as CC-BY. eLife was launched at the end of 2012 to be the world’s leading Open Access publisher of research in the life sciences, and to focus on how to help scientists accelerate discovery.

We are backed by three of the world’s leading funding bodies (HHMI, Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Society) and we are focussed on creating the best experience for researchers when it comes time to publishing their research, from the review process, right through to how their research looks when it gets online.

We chose Drupal as the platform for hosting our journal content, and this case study will discuss:

• what the landscape of adoption of Drupal in STM is looking like now, and the future trends for Drupal in STM (300+ journals will be moving to Drupal in 2014)
• how the modular nature of Drupal has allowed us to take ownership of our site, while working closely with development partners
• how flexible content types in Drupal enable us to customise the look and feel of articles processed through a full XML workflow
• how we aim to add modules back to the Drupal community that can help with research assessment through the display of Altmetrics on articles

We will also talk about the constraints that we have experienced, and how we work with them.