Discipline Biology, medicine Publisher PeerJ Frequency Upon acceptance | Language English Publication history 2013–present | |
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Edited by Jason Hoyt
Peter Binfield | ||
PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is 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), with financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. It was officially launched in June 2012, started accepting submissions on December 3, 2012, and published its first articles on February 12, 2013. The company is a member of CrossRef, CLOCKSS, ORCID, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. The company's offices are in Corte Madera (California), and London.
Contents
Business model
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. PeerJ is complemented by a preprint service named PeerJ Preprints which launched on April 3, 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. Submitted research is judged solely on scientific and methodological soundness (like at PLoS ONE), with peer reviews published alongside the papers.
Reception
The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed Central, Scopus, EMBASE, CAB Abstracts, and ACS databases. According to the Journal Citation Reports, it has a 2015 impact factor of 2.183.
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.
On September 12, 2013 the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers awarded PeerJ the "Publishing Innovation" of the year award.