PeerJ

<i>PeerJ</i>

PeerJ

Academic journal

PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences.[1] It officially launched in June 2012, started accepting submissions on December 3, 2012, and published its first articles on February 12, 2013.[1]

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In 2024, the firm was acquired by traditional research publisher Taylor & Francis.[2]

Overview

PeerJ was originally published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt (formerly at Mendeley) and publisher Peter Binfield (formerly at PLOS One),[3][4][5] with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures,[6] and later funding from Sage Publishing.[7]

The firm is a member of CrossRef,[8] CLOCKSS,[9] ORCID,[8] and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.[10] The company's offices are in Corte Madera (California, USA), and London (Great Britain). Submitted research is judged solely on scientific and methodological soundness (as at PLoS ONE), with a facility for peer reviews to be published alongside each paper.[11]

Business model

PeerJ uses a business model that differs from traditional publishers – in that no subscription fees are charged to its readers – and initially differed from the major open-access publishers in that publication fees were not levied per article but per publishing researcher and at a much lower level.[12] PeerJ also offered a preprint service named PeerJ Preprints (launched on April 3, 2013[13] and discontinued in September 2019).[14] The low costs were said to be in part achieved by using cloud infrastructure: both PeerJ and PeerJ Preprints run on Amazon EC2, with the content stored on Amazon S3.[15]

Originally, PeerJ charged a one-time membership fee to authors that allowed them—with some additional requirements, such as commenting upon, or reviewing, at least one paper per year—to publish in the journal for life.[16]

Since October 2016, PeerJ has reverted to article processing charges, but still offers the lifetime membership subscription as an alternative option. The current charge for non-members publishing a single article in PeerJ is $1,195.00, regardless of the number of authors. Alternatively, the life-time membership permitting one free paper per year for life is $599 per author (basic membership), two per year for $699 (enhanced membership), or five per year for $799 (premium membership).[17] It may sometimes be cheaper to pay the per publication charge than paying membership fees for all authors.

In May 2023, PeerJ introduced Annual Institutional Memberships as an alternative to article processing charges.[18][19]

In 2024, PeerJ was acquired by traditional research publisher Taylor & Francis.[20] The announcement suggests that Taylor & Francis will invest in PeerJ to support it to develop and innovate at greater scale.

Reception

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, the DOAJ, the American Chemical Society (ACS) databases, EMBASE, CAB Abstracts, Europe PubMed Central, AGORA, ARDI, HINARI, OARE, the ProQuest databases, and OCLC.[21] According to the Journal Citation Reports, its impact factor increased from 2.118 in 2017 to 2.353 in 2018.[22]

In April 2013 The Chronicle of Higher Education selected PeerJ CEO and co-founder Jason Hoyt as one of "Ten Top Tech Innovators" for the year.[23]

On September 12, 2013 the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers awarded PeerJ the "Publishing Innovation" of the year award.[24]

Computer science and chemistry journals

On 3 February 2015, PeerJ launched a new journal dedicated to computer science: PeerJ Computer Science.[25] The first article on PeerJ Computer Science was published on 27 May 2015.[26]

On 6 November 2018, PeerJ launched five new journals dedicated to chemistry: PeerJ Physical Chemistry, PeerJ Organic Chemistry, PeerJ Inorganic Chemistry, PeerJ Analytical Chemistry, and PeerJ Materials Science.[27]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Media from PeerJ.

See also

References

  1. [1]
    Van Noorden, R. (2012). "Journal offers flat fee for 'all you can publish'". Nature. 486 (7402): 166. Bibcode:2012Natur.486..166V. doi:10.1038/486166a. PMID 22699586.
  2. [2]
    "Innovative Open Research Publisher PeerJ Joins Taylor & Francis". PeerJ Blog. 2023-03-08. Retrieved 2023-03-08.
  3. [3]
    "New front in open access science publishing row". Reuters. 12 June 2012.
  4. [4]
    "Jason Hoyt".
  5. [5]
    "Pete Binfield".
  6. [6]
    "Tim O'Reilly Backs New Open-Source Publisher PeerJ". dowjones.com. Archived from the original on 2013-09-21. Retrieved 2012-06-14.
  7. [7]
    "Exciting times! PeerJ secures next round of funding led by SAGE and O'Reilly". PeerJ Blog. 2014-07-09. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  8. [8]
    "Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ". PublishersWeekly.com.
  9. [9]
    PeerJ Preserves with the CLOCKSS Archive Archived 2017-10-27 at the Wayback Machine (WebCite archive)
  10. [10]
    OASPA – list of members (WebCite archive)
  11. [11]
    "New OA Journal, Backed by O'Reilly, May Disrupt Academic Publishing – The Digital Shift". The Digital Shift.
  12. [12]
    "New Open Access Journal Lets Scientists Publish 'til They Perish". sciencemag.org.
  13. [13]
    "PeerJ preprints". WorldCat.
  14. [14]
    "PeerJ Preprints to stop accepting new preprints Sep 30th 2019 – PeerJ Blog". Retrieved 2020-01-22.
  15. [15]
    "Pay (less) to publish: ambitious journal aims to disrupt scholarly publishing". Ars Technica. 12 June 2012.
  16. [16]
    "Pando: PeerJ Raises $950K from Tim O'Reilly's Ventures To Make Biomedical Research Accessible to All". Pando. Archived from the original on 2013-09-03. Retrieved 2012-06-14.
  17. [17]
    "Open Access publication prices". Retrieved 2024-04-10.
  18. [18]
    "Annual Institutional Memberships – a new model to move Open Access beyond the APC and towards collective action to support globally equitable access". PeerJ Blog. 2023-05-16. Retrieved 2023-08-24.
  19. [19]
    "PeerJ announces new Open Access membership model amid Article Processing Charge debate". The Bookseller. 2023-05-17. Retrieved 2023-08-24.
  20. [20]
    "Innovative Open Research Publisher PeerJ Joins Taylor & Francis". Taylor&Francis News. 2023-03-08. Retrieved 2023-03-08.
  21. [21]
    "Impact factor and indexing". Retrieved 2018-03-10.
  22. [22]
    "PeerJ". 2019 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Science ed.). Clarivate Analytics. 2018.
  23. [23]
    "The Idea Makers: Tech Innovators 2013". 2013-04-29. Retrieved 2013-05-01.
  24. [24]
    "ALPSP announces award winners". researchinformation.info.
  25. [25]
    "PeerJ announces new journal: PeerJ Computer Science". PeerJ.com.
  26. [26]
    Starr, Joan; Castro, Eleni; Crosas, Mercè; Dumontier, Michel; Downs, Robert R.; Duerr, Ruth; Haak, Laurel L.; Haendel, Melissa; Herman, Ivan; Hodson, Simon; Hourclé, Joe; Kratz, John Ernest; Lin, Jennifer; Nielsen, Lars Holm; Nurnberger, Amy; Proell, Stefan; Rauber, Andreas; Sacchi, Simone; Smith, Arthur; Taylor, Mike; Clark, Tim (27 May 2015). ""Achieving human and machine accessibility of cited data in scholarly publications" by Starr and colleagues". PeerJ Computer Science. 1: e1. doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.1. PMC 4498574. PMID 26167542.
  27. [27]
    "Get ready for Chemistry at PeerJ: Five new journals in Chemistry from Open Access publisher PeerJ". PeerJ.com.
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