June 11, 2013

Happy Birthday PeerJ!

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the paradigm-shifting new journal, PeerJ. It used to be that to read about science, even science paid for by tax payers, you had to pay expensive subscription fees. That all changed with the open access model of scientific publishing, in which readers could get to the published information for free on the Web, and authors instead paid large publication fees. PeerJ improved on that by introducing open publishing: authors pay a low ($99) one-time fee, and can publish one paper a year for life (or unlimited papers each year for less than $300—one-time fee).

Students publish for free.

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Now, anybody can publish high-quality peer-reviewed papers at low cost!

The editorial board is well stocked with over 800 academic editors, including 5 Nobel Laureates (and us), and has all the makings of a fine journal, and the journal has a novel Open Review process that is among the most transparent in the industry.

We have ourselves published three papers in PeerJ, which started publishing just a few months ago on Feb 12th, and have been very happy with the quality and speed of reviews. It’s been a great experience, fast, high-quality reviews that have resulted in high-impact publications (one of my lab’s papers was downloaded 17,000 times in its first week!).

So whether you do science in your lab or in your garage, consider submitting your discoveries to PeerJ!

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