May 2013
5 posts
3 tags
PeerJ Now Indexed in the Directory of Open Access...
PeerJ is pleased to announce that we are now listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). You will notice that in addition to simply being listed, PeerJ articles are also being indexed and presented as a part of the DOAJ database (something that not all journals make available).
The DOAJ “aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly...
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PeerJ now a Full Member of OASPA
Peerj is pleased to announce that we are now a full Member of the Open Access Scholarly publishers Association (OASPA).
OASPA is the main ‘trade organization’ for Open Access publishers. Some 35 publishers (including eLife, Wiley, OUP, F1000 Research, PLOS, SAGE etc) are already Members, and help OASPA to “represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal publishers...
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PeerJ now a Full Member of COPE
PeerJ is pleased to announce that we are now a full Member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
COPE “provides advice to editors and publishers on all aspects of publication ethics and, in particular, how to handle cases of research and publication misconduct.” It was “established in 1997 by a small group of medical journal editors in the UK but now has over...
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Announcing a New Benefit for PeerJ Peer Reviewers
Here at PeerJ we know that the system of pre-publication peer review in operation in today’s scholarly journal environment would not be possible without the selfless efforts of the peer reviewers themselves. At the vast majority of publishers, peer reviewers gain zero recognition and zero reward for their invaluable work, and so it really isn’t surprising that journals find it hard to persuade...
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PeerJ Articles Now Appearing in PubMed and PubMed...
We are pleased to announce that PeerJ articles are now appearing in both PubMed and PubMed Central (the free ‘full text’ archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature from the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Library of Medicine (NLM)). As a result, PeerJ articles will now start receiving PMID’s and PMCID’s.
This follows our previous...
April 2013
9 posts
3 tags
Adding a few carrots to "Open" - announcing...
We started PeerJ from personal convictions that Open Access is a critical component to improving scientific output. Not stopping there, we wanted to give both peer-reviewers and authors the opportunity to make reviews open. Given this option, 65% of authors are choosing to make their reviews public.
Further, we introduced “PrePrints” a couple weeks weeks back. As noted in that...
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Interview with a PrePrint Author - Johnson Thie
We launched PeerJ PrePrints just two weeks ago, and so we were pleased to see that the second submission we received was a preprint that extended the story for one of our published articles. Dr Johnson Thie from the University of Sydney was a co-author on the PeerJ article “Validation of the Emotiv EPOC® EEG gaming system for measuring research quality auditory ERPs” and also the author of PeerJ...
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PeerJ Supports Undergraduate Authors
Undergraduate students occasionally get the opportunity to work on projects which end up being published in the journal literature. For example two of our published articles: “Conservation genetics of extremely isolated urban populations of the northern dusky salamander (Desmognathus fuscus) in New York City” and “Significant changes in the skin microbiome mediated by the sport of roller derby”...
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Four Universities Now Providing PeerJ Memberships...
[* Also see updates at the bottom of this post]
We are pleased to announce [PDF] that four* universities have entered into an institutional arrangement to centrally fund PeerJ Membership fees for their faculty.
Since announcing ourselves last June, we have seen a lot of interest from institutions in the PeerJ model. Of course, our Membership fees are already very low for individuals, but this...
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PeerJ accepted for indexing by PubMed Central,...
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.
We are fully aware that being appropriately indexed and maximally discoverable is extremely important for our authors. We...
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Interview With PeerJ Editor Keith Crandall
With this week’s publication of the ‘Living Fossil’ tadpole shrimp article, it was fortuitous timing that we had also conducted an interview with the Academic Editor who handled that paper, Professor Keith Crandall. Although Professor Crandall’s comments do not concern that submission in particular, it is very nice that we have been able to publish the article, an interview with the...
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Interview With an Author - Emma Schachner
Today’s Interview with an Author is with Dr. Emma Schachner, the corresponding author on “Pulmonary anatomy in the Nile crocodile and the evolution of unidirectional airflow in Archosauria”, an article which has attracted quite a bit of interest in the paleontology community, culminating most recently with a spirited discussion in the comments thread of this article (discussing...
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‘PeerJ PrePrints’ - a new Preprint Server for the...
Today, April 3rd 2013, we are very pleased to announce the launch of ‘PeerJ PrePrints’ an entirely new ‘preprint server’ for the Biological and Medical Sciences. With the launch of PeerJ PrePrints, the publication ecosystem of PeerJ is now complete.
There is a ‘long form’ guest blog post at Scientific American describing more of the background to this launch, but of course we wanted to...
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Interview With an Author - Africa Gómez
Today’s ‘Interview With an Author’ coincides with their publication in PeerJ (it is also this week’s featured image showing a tadpole shrimp on the front of PeerJ). We spoke to Dr Africa Gómez, senior author on today’s Multiple global radiations in tadpole shrimps challenge the concept of ‘living fossils’ article. Dr Gómez is a NERC Advanced Fellow in the Department...
March 2013
11 posts
1 tag
Interview With an Author - Jeremy Bruenn
In today’s ‘interview with an author’ we spoke to Jeremy Bruenn, from the Department of Biological Sciences, SUNY/Buffalo. Professor Bruenn is the senior author of the recent PeerJ article “Virus-host co-evolution under a modified nuclear genetic code” which published three weeks ago, and so we were very interested in hearing about his experiences with us.
PJ: With this research, why did...
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Highlighting the updated PeerJ membership pricing...
This past weekend we quietly rolled out a new design for the different memberships available to publish with PeerJ. Nothing is changing about the already low pricing, but we’ve broken things out a bit more to answer a few questions that kept coming up.
The most common feedback we have gotten about the memberships was:
1. Can I pay for my co-authors?
2. Can institutions do any thing...
PeerJ Author Jessica Green talks at TED
For those of you who enjoyed the recent PeerJ article on the “Significant changes in the skin microbiome mediated by the sport of roller derby”,TED just released a new video featuring Jessica Green (the senior author of the PeerJ article) as she discusses the microbiome that is present in buildings. Fascinating viewing!
And don’t forget to also check out the video based on the...
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Six Reasons to Publish With PeerJ
Nature called PeerJ “a significant innovation” and the Times Higher Education called us “groundreaking”! If you’ve been wondering why, then read on…
Six Reasons To Submit Your Next Article To PeerJ 1. PeerJ is Open Access - don’t bury your research in a journal which no one can access. With PeerJ not only can everyone read your work, you also retain your...
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Interview With PeerJ Editor Jen Wagner
This week’s ‘Interview with an Editor’ is with Dr Jennifer K. Wagner. Jennifer conducts multidisciplinary research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies (Penn CIGHT).
She is also a licensed attorney practicing in Pennsylvania and was one of the first editors to join the PeerJ Editorial Board.
PJ: What do you see as wrong...
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Interview With An Author - James Meadow
Dr James Meadow was the corresponding author on the recent PeerJ paper regarding the effect of Roller Derby on the composition of the skin microbiome. The paper generated a lot of media attention and has already been described by some, as their “favorite microbiome study”.
Dr Meadow is a postdoctoral research associate at the Biology and the Built Environment Center (BioBE) at...
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The Reviews Are In - PeerJ is Fast!
PeerJ is rapidly gaining a reputation for fast and fair editorial decisions, and so we would thought this would be a good time to highlight some of the spontaneous reactions we have been seeing from authors who have experienced our process. We have been particularly satisfied to see a large number of authors who have been sufficiently impressed to blog or tweet their experiences. Read reactions...
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Interview With PeerJ Editor Jonathan Eisen
This week’s ‘Interview with an Editor’ is with Jonathan Eisen. Jonathan is a Professor at the University of California, Davis as well as an Adjunct Scientist at the DOE Joint Genome Institute. He is the Recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Science (2011), Chair of the Advisory Board for PLOS Biology, and an elected Member of the American Academy of Microbiology. We caught up with him...
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Evolution of timeline design at PeerJ
We’ve built the entire PeerJ platform from scratch - the submission areas, the review area, and the publication areas. This is in contrast to most publishers that use hosted or licensed services for each of those three areas (submission, review, publication). We went to the trouble of doing this for two reasons:
Rapid iteration - Using hosted or licensed solutions means you have to wait in...
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Interview with PeerJ Editor Fabiana Kubke
This is the second in our Series of Interviews with PeerJ Editors, giving them a voice to express their thoughts about academic publishing, open access and PeerJ.
This time around we spoke to Fabiana Kubke who is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Medical Sciences (Department of Anatomy with Radiology) and a member of the Centre for Brain Research at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
...
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Naming the Monkey
We know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting the Naming of the Monkey, but we wanted to wait for all time zones to finish Monday the 4th, before we made a decision. We received a lot of great entries – mostly via Twitter, Facebook and this blog – and it was a hard call. Naming a Monkey is not something to take lightly, Monkey will have to live with this name and doesn’t want to be teased...
February 2013
9 posts
3 tags
Interview with PeerJ Editor Andy Farke
This is the first in a Series of posts placing the spotlight on some of the PeerJ Editors and Advisors, to ask them for their opinions on Open Access in general, and PeerJ in particular. We hope that this Series will help expand upon some of the issues that academics are dealing with as they make sense of the transition that is underway right now from a Subscription-based publication environment...
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Name that Monkey - A PeerJ Competition
Many of you already know and love the PeerJ Monkey Mascot. Up until now, we just called it “Monkey” and Monkey has already starred in its own line of T-Shirts, Mugs, Stickers and Pins. But it doesn’t seem right for Monkey to go nameless anymore, especially now that Monkey is an International Media Star and Monkey’s Infinite Troupe of Monkey Co-authors have almost finished their Shakespeare play. ...
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The thinking behind the design of PeerJ's PDFs
We have had a great reception to our PDF design, and so we thought it would be helpful for Jackie Thai (our Head of Publishing Operations) to explain some of the philosophy that went into the design. Although we are an ‘online only’ publisher, we know that many people still prefer to read a PDF, and so it was important to get the design just right. Here, Jackie explains how we went about it: ...
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Linkfest for the PeerJ launch
PeerJ published its first 30 articles a week ago (and published 10 more today), so it seemed like a good time to round up some of the coverage we received in a quick linkfest.
In addition to our own blog posts announcing the launch; overviewing some of the innovations of the site; explaining our choice of featured image; featuring some of the reaction to our Open Peer Review; and overviewing our...
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How PeerJ's architecture keeps costs down for...
PeerJ was effortlessly able to support a 2000% increase in traffic on launch day with zero down time or any slowing of the site. A typical day also sees several website updates for enhanced features or bug fixes at the click of a button. How?
Even 5-10 years ago, starting a new online company, particularly a publishing one, meant hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in...
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The Reception to PeerJ’s Open Peer Review
When we announced that we would be encouraging Open Peer Review in PeerJ, we must confess that we were unsure how the reception would go. We are pleased to say that the positive response exceeded our best expectations!
To summarize our system - we encourage our peer reviewers to provide their name as part of their review; and we also give our authors the option to publish the full peer review...
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Why a dinosaur neck dominates the front of PeerJ...
We wanted to talk about our choice of ‘lead image’ for the launch of PeerJ. This image, Fig 5 from “Why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks”, perfectly encapsulates what PeerJ is all about, and when we saw it, we just knew that it would make the ideal featured image for our homepage. The significance of launching a new open access journal highlighting an evolutionary...
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The Launch of PeerJ
Today, February 12th 2013, we are very pleased to announce the publication of the first 30 PeerJ articles. Normally the launch of a new journal would be accompanied by an editorial in the pages of the first issue, but here at PeerJ we do things a little bit differently - we only publish Research Articles, and we don’t have issues, so we are marking the launch with a blog post. We wanted to take...
Some of the Innovations of the PeerJ Publication...
We launched our publication site today, and we wanted to outline some of the innovative functionality, and thinking, that you will see there. Before we highlight these developments, it is important to recognize that we are developing with a rapid build and test cycle - meaning that users will see continual improvements in the functionality as we go forwards. With that said, the functionality that...
January 2013
1 post
Long Term Archiving and PeerJ
Now that PeerJ is fully open for submissions we thought that readers might be interested in learning about some of the work that went on behind the scenes to get us here. This is the third in a series of three blog posts which describe some of the groups we have been working with, or expect to work with, as we move forwards. Effective Long Term Archiving of the scholarly literature is extremely...
December 2012
5 posts
3 tags
PeerJ in 2012: From idea to reality
2012 has been an interesting year, here at PeerJ.
The planning for PeerJ (which was originally called OpenRePub) was begun by Jason Hoyt, back in November 2011 with the release of a small landing page, followed by a blog in January 2012. Both were intended to test the reaction to an Open Access publisher, which would provide a way for authors to publish their articles in a high quality venue for...
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Unique Identifiers and PeerJ
Unique Identifiers are, of course, very important when dealing with the scholarly literature (which must maintain stable and persistent pointers to published content, as well as respecting the concept of the Version of Record). For this purpose, as explained below, our publications have ISSNs and we have partnered with both CrossRef and EZID. ISSNs Before even contemplating unique identifiers for...
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PeerJ and Academic Publishing Organisations
Now that PeerJ is fully open for submissions we thought that readers might be interested in learning about some of the work that went on behind the scenes to get us here. PeerJ is a part of the academic publishing ecosystem, and as such there are a number of ‘industry’ groups which are essential for us to work with – groups whose services will help us publish articles in an effective and ‘industry...
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PeerJ exhibiting at the ASCB Annual Meeting this...
Cell Biology is, of course, a very large field, but already PeerJ has a substantial presence in the area, with over 115 Academic Editors covering various aspects of the discipline. In addition, our Advisory Board contains several world-renowned Cell Biologists including, for example Mina Bissell (past-president of the American Society of Cell Biology), Adrian Bird (ex Governor of the Wellcome...
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PeerJ now open for submissions; PeerJ PrePrints...
We are pleased to announce that as of today (December 3rd, 2012) PeerJ, a fully peer-reviewed Open Access journal, is open for submissions! If you would like to submit, you simply need to sign up for a Free or Paid PeerJ Membership, log in, and follow the “Submit or View My Manuscripts” link at the top of the page.
With this news, we are moving swiftly towards publishing our first articles in...
November 2012
1 post
4 tags
PeerJ to open for submissions on December 3rd
Since we originally announced PeerJ back in June 2012, we have been hard at work building up an Editorial Board of leading academics (which now numbers overs 700), an Advisory Board (which now has 20 distinguished members, including 5 Nobel Laureates) and also creating entirely new online Submission and Peer Review software. Today, after a period of extensive Beta testing by members of our...
October 2012
1 post
4 tags
Help PeerJ celebrate Open Access week and win!
This week is Open Access Week – all across the globe, institutions are organizing events to promote and explain Open Access to their faculty and students. Now in its sixth year, this is a positive jamboree of openness!
To help celebrate and promote the event, we are giving away one of five PeerJ mugs each day this week. To enter all you have to do is post an original tweet including the hash tag...
September 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Announcing Jackie & Patrick - new starters at...
This week we added two heavyweights to our team at PeerJ and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
Jackie Thai is our new Head of Publishing Operations and comes to us by way of PLOS ONE, the world’s largest journal. At PLOS ONE, she built and managed the editorial operations team, managing workflows and processes. Prior to PLOS ONE, she started her publishing career at Neurosurgery. Welcome,...
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Why PeerJ uses https everywhere
Your privacy is important. Unknowingly, some of you may be entering data into web forms that are unprotected. Most of the data being entered may be harmless, e.g. a food preference in an online menu. Even if you are not entering data and just visiting a web page that isn’t using https then you may be exposing your privacy.
The biggest offense I see most often when I browse the web are login...
August 2012
1 post
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What does the 'J' in 'PeerJ' stand for?
It’s a question that comes up frequently. Usually we follow with a joke that “Peer” is just “Peter” with the T missing, and ‘J’ is for Jason. That’s a good soundbite, but as it happens, there’s a deeper explanation.
We often hear how the concept of the “journal” is dated, or dead even. With the advent of the Internet and unlimited...
July 2012
1 post
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Announcing PeerJ's first group of Academic Editors
We are very pleased that just four weeks after our launch, we are now in a position to announce the first group of almost 150 scientists who have joined the Editorial Board of PeerJ. As we build up this Board, we have formed two groups of Editors - the main ‘Editorial Board of Academic Editors’ and a much smaller ‘Academic Advisory Board’.
Academic Editors are the...
June 2012
3 posts
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Launch Day – What Next?
We have been really excited by the reception that PeerJ received after our announcement and we would like thank all of our well-wishers and new members for their support.
A big announcement like yesterday’s naturally leads to questions, and we weren’t able to cover everything via Twitter, so we wanted to take this opportunity to answer some of them here.
How will you build your prestige?
That is...
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Linkfest from Day 1 of PeerJ
The following is a reasonably complete collection of links to the PeerJ coverage from today’s launch announcement.
We will update this post as we go
The Library Journal Nature Ars Technica Pandodaily Confessions of a Science Librarian (and again) Reciprocal Space Christina’s Lis Rant Reuters The Chronicle Publishers Weekly The Mendeley Blog SciLogs (German) I’m a Chordata Science Insider...
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Your Peers, Your Science. Academic Publishing is...
Today, June 12th 2012, we are pleased to formally announce PeerJ. Our website now includes full information about our two publications (PeerJ and PeerJ PrePrints); our 3 tiers of membership plan; and how we will operate as a dynamic, innovative scholarly publisher. Our press release can be read here, endorsements from thought leaders can be read here, and early media coverage has already included...
January 2012
3 posts
3 tags
Making scholarly content reusable
One of the great frustrations with scholarly publishing today is that primary research data is an afterthought. At best, you can download a dataset (probably after searching five minutes for the link). At worst, there is no dataset to be found and you have to resort to bugging the author for more info. And it is not just datasets that are sorely abused in publishing - the in-line tables, figures,...
