''PeerJ'' is an

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

scientific mega journal covering research in the

biological Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary in ...

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 initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing. PeerJ 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 The LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") project, under the auspices of Stanford University, is a peer-to-peer network that develops and supports an open source system allowing libraries to collect, preserve and provide their readers with acc ...

ORCID The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic ...

, and the

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...

. 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.

Business model

''PeerJ'' uses a

business model A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, social, ...

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 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 a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal ...

were not levied per article but per publishing researcher and at a much lower level. ''PeerJ'' also offered a

preprint 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 versio ...

service named ''PeerJ Preprints'' (launched on April 3, 2013 and discontinued in September 2019). The low costs were said to be in part achieved by using

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may co ...

infrastructure: both ''PeerJ'' and ''PeerJ Preprints'' run on

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ...

, with the content stored on Amazon S3. 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. Since October 2016, ''PeerJ'' has reverted to

article processing charge 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 a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. ...

s, 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 $399 per author (basic membership) or five per year for $499 (premium membership). It may sometimes be cheaper to pay the per publication charge than paying membership fees for all authors.

Reception

The journal is abstracted and indexed in

Science Citation Index Expanded The Science Citation Index Expanded – previously entitled Science Citation Index – is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and ...

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...

, PubMed Central,

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

, Web of Science,

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

, the

DOAJ The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proje ...

, the

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...

(ACS) databases, EMBASE,

CAB Abstracts CAB Direct is a source of references for the '' applied life sciences'' It incorporates two bibliographic databases: ''CAB Abstracts'' and ''Global Health''. CAB Direct is an access point for multiple bibliographic databases produced by ''CABI' ...

, Europe PubMed Central,

AGORA The agora (; grc, ἀγορά, romanized: ', meaning "market" in Modern Greek) was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states. It is the best representation of a city-state's response to accommodate the social and political order of t ...

ARDI ARDI is the Access to Research for Development and Innovation program, a partnership between the World Intellectual Property Organization and major scientific and technical publishers. ARDI provides access to nearly 10,000 online journals, books and ...

HINARI Hinari Access to Research for Health Programme was set up by the World Health Organization and major publishers to enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature. There are up to 15,000 e-journals and up to ...

, OARE, the

ProQuest ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene B. Power. ProQuest is known for its applications and information services for libraries, provid ...

databases, and

OCLC OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was ...

. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...

'', its

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...

increased from 2.118 in 2017 to 2.353 in 2018. In April 2013 ''

The Chronicle of Higher Education ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'' is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals (staff members and administrators). A subscription is required to rea ...

'' 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 The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) is an international trade association of non-profit publishers created in 1972. It is the largest association of scholarly and professional publishers in the world, with nearl ...

awarded ''PeerJ'' the "Publishing Innovation" of the year award.

Computer science and chemistry journals

On 3 February 2015, PeerJ launched a new journal dedicated to

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

: ''PeerJ Computer Science''. The first article on PeerJ Computer Science was published on 27 May 2015. On 6 November 2018, PeerJ launched five new journals dedicated to

chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

: ''PeerJ Physical Chemistry'', ''PeerJ Organic Chemistry'', ''PeerJ Inorganic Chemistry'', ''PeerJ Analytical Chemistry'', and ''PeerJ Materials Science''.

References

External links

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PeerJ PrePrintsPeerJ Computer Science
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