We are excited to announce the launch today of a new addition to the PeerJ family: PeerJ Computer Science, a cross-disciplinary open access journal publishing articles across all fields of computer science.
PeerJ PrePrints is accepting computer science preprints from today. Peer-review articles can be submitted to PeerJ Computer Science from Thursday February 12th, which is also our two-year anniversary of publishing in the biological and medical sciences. Head over to PeerJ Computer Science to read more about the journal and its 322 strong Editorial and Advisory Board (which includes a number of high profile computer scientists including Vint Cerf, Wendy Hall, David Patterson and Mary Shaw).
We are offering free publication to all those who register their email on the journal’s homepage, and also to their colleagues simply by providing their email details or tweeting the link. Please help us spread the word!
So why computer science, and why now you may ask? Well, ever since we launched PeerJ two years ago we’ve received a constant stream of requests to bring our unique lifetime publishing model and user design philosophy to other disciplines. We now feel the time is right to build upon our success by offering PeerJ’s services to the computer science community, who have been looking for a modern and improved publishing experience.
Our existing connections with Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and a member of the PeerJ Board, place us well to build deeper connections within the computer science community and to understand how best to serve their needs. We can only agree with Tim when he says “Open source software has transformed the practice of software development. So it is about time for an open access computer science journal to bring computer science research publishing into the 21st century.”
We also know from our many discussions with the Editorial and Advisory Board for PeerJ Computer Science that the landscape for academic publishing within computer science is ripe for change. There are very few open access journals currently serving the computer science community, and authors in this field are mainly publishing their work either at academic conferences or in subscription journals. The traditional journal route can be very slow for authors in this field with lengthy review processes, which is one of the reasons why authors often find that disseminating their work at a conference is a much faster route to obtaining a decision. The current system for publishing in computer science is in need of some fresh innovation, and by opening up submissions for computer scientists we aim to bring a 21st century publishing platform to computer scientists.
PeerJ Computer Science will operate in exactly the same way as PeerJ – articles will be published through CC BY licensing ensuring that the content is freely accessible to the world. Authors will still only pay a low cost fee to publish their article, starting at $99 for lifetime publication. Although it remains to be seen how fast the new journal will be, our life science and medicine authors currently receive a first decision in a median time of 22 days, which would help to address the need for quick turnaround times for computer scientists. By publishing cross-disciplinary research across the full spectrum of computer science, PeerJ Computer Science hopes to engender more cross-fertilisation between fields and to become a hub for the computer science community as a whole to interact.
We intend to work closely with the computer science community from the outset to help shape the journal as it grows. We’ll be listening intently to our Authors, Reviewers, Editorial and Advisory Boards and taking on board their suggestions and recommendations. We know computer scientists want a better way to publish their research, and we will aim to provide that by shaping the platform to meet their requirements. We’re excited to see how we can move publishing in computer science forward and better serve the needs of this community.