Asking Authors to Buy 'Memberships' for Open Access - The Digital Campus 2013 - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Jason Hoyt thinks scientific publishing can be faster, sleeker, and a whole lot cheaper. The Stanford-trained geneticist is a fan of open-access journals, which make scholarly articles freely available online rather than put them behind paywalls. But he argues that having authors shoulder big publishing fees—a popular model for open access—burdens researchers with costs that are too high, often thousands of dollars per article. So he left the world of research and started his own open-access, peer-reviewed publishing platform, which brings a lean, start-up mentality to scholarly publishing. Called PeerJ, it charges authors far less than many other publishing options do, and it offers a submission-to-publication timetable measured in weeks instead of months. PeerJ works on a lifetime-membership model. "Pay once, publish for life," the site advertises. A basic individual membership begins at $99 and entitles a researcher to publish one article a year in PeerJ. (The base price goes up a little if you wait to pay until you have an article accepted.) Membership doesn't guarantee publication; articles must make it through peer review, handled by a board of almost 800 academic editors who are established researchers in science and medicine ... Beyond the basic membership level, there's an 'Enhanced' option—$199 for two articles a year—and an 'Investigator' level ($299 for unlimited articles per year). At all levels, publication depends on successful peer review.  Memberships also include the option to take advantage of a preprint service, which enables researchers to distribute drafts before publication. And PeerJ has just begun offering an institutional option to allow colleges or academic libraries to pay their faculty authors' way. All co-authors on a paper must have PeerJ memberships.  Will enough institutions and individual authors sign on to sustain PeerJ? The open-source advocate and publishing guru Tim O'Reilly must think so. O'Reilly Media and his 'seed-stage' investment group O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures are PeerJ's chief sources of start-up capital. Mr. Hoyt and Mr. Binfield think that cheap, open-access publishing with a user-friendly design will appeal to researchers, especially as the site becomes more tailored to individual authors' contributions ... In 2006 he built an online reference manager that let researchers store scientific literature. That caught the eye of the founders of the start-up Mendeley, which was doing something similar. Mr. Hoyt completed his doctorate in 2008 and went to work for Mendeley as chief scientist and vice president for research and development. After a couple of years, though, he found that he had regrets about not pursuing his own start-up idea. 'I had a desire to go out on my own,' he says.  He thought about the possibility raised by some of the researchers working on the human genome: What if we could sequence an individual's DNA for as little as a hundred dollars? And if we could dream of pulling that off, Mr. Hoyt asked himself, why not a hundred-dollar article?

'I knew that the margins were way too high in publishing, and they could come down,' he says. It didn't make sense to him that it had to cost thousands of dollars to get a paper into print. And as a believer in open access, he 'was always against subscription paywalls.'  'It seemed to me that there was a gap in the whole publishing market,' Mr. Hoyt says. 'Nobody was taking a lean start-up approach to publishing.'  ..."