''PeerJ'' is an

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

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 Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

mega journal A mega journal (also mega-journal and megajournal) is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by '' PLOS ONE''. This ...

covering research in the

biological Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, and distribution of ...

and

medical science Medicine is the science and practice of caring for patients, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pra ...

s. It officially launched in June 2012, started accepting submissions on December 3, 2012, and published its first articles on February 12, 2013. In 2024, the firm was acquired by traditional research publisher

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in the United Kingdom that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, CRC Press, Routledge, F1000 (publisher), F1000 Research and Dovepress. It i ...

Overview

PeerJ was originally published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt (formerly at

Mendeley Mendeley is a reference management, reference manager software founded in 2007 by Doctor of Philosophy, PhD students Paul Foeckler, Victor Henning, Jan Reichelt and acquired by the Dutch academic publishing company Elsevier in 2013. It is used to ...

) and publisher Peter Binfield (formerly at '' PLOS One''), with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...

's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from

Sage Publishing Sage Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American Independent business, independent Academic publishing, academic publishing company, founded in 1965 in New York City by Sara Miller McCune and now based in the Newbury Park, California, ...

. The firm is a member of CrossRef, CLOCKSS,

ORCID The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication. This addresses the problem that a particular author's contributions to the scien ...

, 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 London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

(England, UK). 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 a Company, business organization creates, delivers, and captures value creation, value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-pub ...

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 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 versi ...

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 ...

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

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon'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 ap ...

, with the content stored on

Amazon S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e-commerc ...

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

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 $599 per author (basic membership), two per year for $699 (enhanced membership), or five per year for $799 (premium membership). It may sometimes be cheaper to pay the per publication charge than paying membership fees for all authors. In May 2023, ''PeerJ'' introduced Annual Institutional Memberships as an alternative to article processing charges. In 2024, PeerJ was acquired by traditional research publisher Taylor & Francis. The announcement suggests that Taylor & Francis will invest in PeerJ to support it to develop and innovate at greater scale.

Reception

The journal is abstracted and indexed in

Science Citation Index Expanded The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) is a citation index owned by Clarivate and previously by Thomson Reuters. It was created by the Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information, launched in 1964 as Science Citation Index ( ...

PubMed PubMed is an openly accessible, free database which includes 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 Institute ...

PubMed Central PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Cente ...

Scopus Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is c ...

Web of Science The Web of Science (WoS; previously known as Web of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that provides (typically via the internet) access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedi ...

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

, 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 miss ...

, 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 ...

(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 Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) is an open-access repository that contains millions of biomedical research works. It was known as UK PubMed Central until 1 November 2012. Service Europe PMC provides free access to more than 9.3 million full-te ...

AGORA The agora (; , romanized: ', meaning "market" in Modern Greek) was a central public space in ancient Ancient Greece, Greek polis, city-states. The literal meaning of the word "agora" is "gathering place" or "assembly". The agora was the center ...

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

databases, and

OCLC OCLC, Inc. 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 founded in 1967 as the ...

. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publication by Clarivate. It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science Core Collection. It provides information about academic journals in the natur ...

'', its

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a type of journal ranking. Journals with higher impact factor values are considered more prestigious or important within their field. The Impact Factor of a journa ...

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 an American newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals, including staff members and administrators. A subscription ...

'' 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 over ...

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, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

: ''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 scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

: ''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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