Biological Publishing Landscape Changes with Arrival of PeerJ

We read in today’s news (served by Twitter) that -

PeerJ accepted for indexing by PubMed Central, PubMed and Scopus

We are pleased to announce that PeerJ has been accepted for indexing by PubMed Central (PMC), PubMed and Scopus. PeerJ articles will start to appear in PMC, PubMed and Scopus in the next few weeks. In addition, Google Scholar has indexed PeerJ content since launch.

Who is PeerJ? They are the ‘new kids on the block’ with goals to make PLOS One obsolete. From the wiki page (highlighting done by us) -

PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences.It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by publisher Peter Binfield (formerly at PLOS ONE) and CEO Jason Hoyt (formerly at Mendeley), with financial backing of USD 950,000 from O’Reilly Media and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. It was officially launched in June 2012, started accepting submissions on December 3rd, 2012, and published its first articles on February 12th, 2013. The company is a member of CrossRef, CLOCKSS, ORCID, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. They have offices in Corte Madera, California and London.

PeerJ uses a business model that differs both from traditional publishers - in that no subscription fees are charged to its readers - and from the major open-access publishers in that the publication fees are levied not per article but per publishing researcher and at a much lower level.[8] PeerJ is complemented by a preprint service named PeerJ Preprints which launched on April 3rd, 2013. The low costs are in part achieved by using cloud infrastructure: both PeerJ and PeerJ Preprints run on Amazon EC2, with the content stored on Amazon S3.

**PeerJ charges authors a one-time membership fee that allows them - with some additional requirements, such as commenting upon, or reviewing, at least one paper per year - to publish in the journal for the rest of their life.

Authors are charged $99 to be able to publish one paper a year, $199 for two papers a year and $299 for unlimited publications. Submitted research is judged solely on scientific and methodological soundness (just like at PLoS ONE), with peer reviews published alongside the papers.**

Clearly open access is here to stay. What will happen to closed-access journals? Do not forget to collect their ‘DNA’ before they are gone. Some day it will be helpful to launch a ‘dinosaur genome project’.

Related:

Peter Binfield’s Farewell Message at PLOS One before he left for PeerJ

Peter Binfield Leaves PLOSONE to Found A Novel OA Journal