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 for its research staff who come to PeerJ?
3. I had no idea you had a free plan that also let’s me publish a preprint.
4. And we often heard that because the $99 per author for life is such a new model, that people didn’t immediately have a way to compare the pricing to other publishing options.
The redesign was an attempt to take the information on the old single page and make it clear.
First, the old design had individual, group, and institutional offers all on a single page. We broke these out into separate pages and created a new contact form for institutional enquiries rather than having it combined with the group plan purchase or finding the business@ email buried in the FAQ.
New header – separate landing page links for memberships
Second, for group plans we tried to make it more clear that 1) they actually exist and 2) that they are great for one person to make the payment on behalf of all authors (similar to how traditional article processing charges are handled in other journals).
Third, we redesigned the individual membership pricing layout. Before they were separate boxes, which made comparison between membership plans difficult and did not include the free plan in an obvious to see way. There is now one table to easily compare the free, basic, enhanced, and investigator membership features.
Old pricing layout
New pricing layout
The new pricing layout brings the Free plan into focus and adds clarity to feature differences between other plans.
Finally, we added a price comparison chart versus other Open Access venues. The advantage of PeerJ’s membership model becomes a little more clear when viewing this table. Even if you publish just once, it still saves quite a bit (average of 5 authors per article = $495 in PeerJ). What some people forget though is that you never have to pay again to publish once per year (other plans available too). Compare that to other journals where you pay each and every time you publish.
