PeerJ

Last updated

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 (England, UK). 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]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific journal</span> Periodical journal publishing scientific research

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines. Unlike professional or trade magazines, scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content. With origins dating back to the 17th century, the publication of scientific journals has evolved significantly, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific knowledge, fostering academic discourse, and facilitating collaboration within the scientific community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright, which regulates post-publication uses of the work.

F1000 is an open research publisher for scientists, scholars, and clinical researchers. F1000 offers a different research evaluation service from standard academic journals by offering peer-review after, rather than before, publishing a research article. Initially, F1000 was named after the 1,000 faculty members that performed peer-reviews, but over time F1000 expanded to more than 8,000 members. When F1000 was acquired by Taylor & Francis Group in January 2020, it kept the publishing services. F1000Prime and F1000 Workspace were acquired by different brands.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-archiving</span> Authorial deposit of documents to provide open access

Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.

Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London, Princeton, New Jersey, and Auckland. In September 2017, Dove Medical Press was acquired by the Taylor and Francis Group.

A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.

Nature Precedings was an open access electronic preprint repository of scholarly work in the fields of biomedical sciences, chemistry, and earth sciences. It ceased accepting new submissions as of April 3, 2012.

Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:

  1. Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity.
  2. Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.
  3. Open participation: The wider community are able to contribute to the review process.

ZooKeys is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering zoological taxonomy, phylogeny, and biogeography. It was established in 2008 and the founding editor-in-chief was Terry Erwin until his death in 2020. In December 2023, Torsten Dikow was appointed the new editor-in-chief. It is published by Pensoft Publishers.

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.

Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Who's Afraid of Peer Review?</span> Science article by John Bohannon

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of open access</span>

The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer Community in</span> Scientific organization

Peer Community in (PCI) is a non-profit scientific organization that offers an editorial process of open science by creating specific communities of researchers reviewing and recommending preprints in their field. Since 2021, a new journal, Peer Community Journal, publishes recommended preprints.

References

  1. 1 2 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. "Innovative Open Research Publisher PeerJ Joins Taylor & Francis". PeerJ Blog. 2023-03-08. Retrieved 2023-03-08.
  3. "New front in open access science publishing row". Reuters. 12 June 2012.
  4. "Jason Hoyt".
  5. "Pete Binfield".
  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. "Exciting times! PeerJ secures next round of funding led by SAGE and O'Reilly". PeerJ Blog. 2014-07-09. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  8. 1 2 "Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ". PublishersWeekly.com.
  9. PeerJ Preserves with the CLOCKSS Archive Archived 2017-10-27 at the Wayback Machine (WebCite archive)
  10. OASPA – list of members (WebCite archive)
  11. "New OA Journal, Backed by O'Reilly, May Disrupt Academic Publishing – The Digital Shift". The Digital Shift.
  12. "New Open Access Journal Lets Scientists Publish 'til They Perish". sciencemag.org.
  13. "PeerJ preprints". WorldCat.
  14. "PeerJ Preprints to stop accepting new preprints Sep 30th 2019 – PeerJ Blog" . Retrieved 2020-01-22.
  15. "Pay (less) to publish: ambitious journal aims to disrupt scholarly publishing". Ars Technica. 12 June 2012.
  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. "Open Access publication prices" . Retrieved 2024-04-10.
  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. "PeerJ announces new Open Access membership model amid Article Processing Charge debate". The Bookseller. 2023-05-17. Retrieved 2023-08-24.
  20. "Innovative Open Research Publisher PeerJ Joins Taylor & Francis". Taylor&Francis News. 2023-03-08. Retrieved 2023-03-08.
  21. "Impact factor and indexing" . Retrieved 2018-03-10.
  22. "PeerJ". 2019 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Science ed.). Clarivate Analytics. 2018.
  23. "The Idea Makers: Tech Innovators 2013". 2013-04-29. Retrieved 2013-05-01.
  24. "ALPSP announces award winners". researchinformation.info.
  25. "PeerJ announces new journal: PeerJ Computer Science". PeerJ.com.
  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. "Get ready for Chemistry at PeerJ: Five new journals in Chemistry from Open Access publisher PeerJ". PeerJ.com.