PeerJ - the blog

We are pleased to announce that as of today (December 3^rd, 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 January 2013. PeerJ PrePrints, which will make use of the same publication platform as PeerJ, will launch around the same time.

Updating the publishing experience

We also felt that the dated process of publishing a peer-reviewed manuscript needed a soup-to-nuts overhaul. We don’t just think differently at PeerJ, we’ve also built a unique submission and peer-review system with the aim to make the experience more modern, painless and faster for everyone.

Over the past month, we have been improving that system through a closed-beta with invited authors and editors. We were hoping to put 20-30 manuscripts through in November for this beta test. Our expectations were blown away; more than 80 manuscripts were started and more than 70 submitted thus far. These are coming from world-class universities and research facilities: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, U. of Wisconsin, U. of Michigan, and many other top facilities throughout the world.

We can’t thank these early beta authors, our editors or reviewers enough for their feedback and patience.

While we are now open to all, we’ve still applied the beta label to the system. We are looking for more feedback throughout the remainder of 2012. A bonus of this is that any bugs or problems you experience are usually addressed in a matter of hours with personal attention. It’s the least we can do to thank you for being one of the first to submit to PeerJ.

From all of us at PeerJ,

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

There were four goals stated in the first blog post that are among the guiding principles of this new venture. Each goal serves to add value back to science. 

Being Open Access is the first principle, and is one of the best methods to add value back to the scientific community (as well as the taxpayers who fund that research). The need for more voices in the Open Access movement is greater than ever, as many stakeholders seek to block government-mandated Open Access policies. Unless you’ve been marooned on an island for the past eight weeks, you will have undoubtedly heard of the debate raging both in the U.S. Congress and on the Internet about the SOPA bill. That bill is backed by many in the publishing industry, both directly (such as Elsevier) and indirectly through the Association of American Publishers. SOPA and other efforts to block Open Access (such as the Research ‘Works’ Act) are a threat to the advancement of science. 

So let’s make some lemonade from the lemons going on about in the publishing world at the moment. While some publishers try to stop time to protect their business models through Acts of Congress, new players have the opportunity to innovate in the space they are neglecting. It’s a great time to start a new open access publishing company!

As a new venture, PeerJ can start with a blank slate - unencumbered by prior business decisions, product lines, or business models. Instead, PeerJ is creating a new business model based on a symbiotic relationship with the science community and lay public. It is ridiculous that Open Access to scientific content is not open by default. It actually shouldn’t have to be a goal, it should be expected. PeerJ aims to give value back. 

No one can deny that. The question is, what should it change into?

Governing that change needs to be a recognition by publishers of the essential role they play in advancing (or blockading) scientific progress. With that in mind here are four goals where, if achieved, publishing can add extreme value to the research community:

1. Make it open access

2. Make it reusable

3. Make it low cost

4. Make it digestible to both the lay person and researcher

Upcoming posts on this blog will explore these four goals and some of the guiding principles of PeerJ in more detail.

PeerJ Team