New and exciting kid on the block: PeerJ | A Blog Around The Clock, Scientific American Blog Network

“As many of you know, before accepting a job at Scientific American, I worked at PLoS for three years (and became a vocal Open Access Evangelist even before that). While there, I worked closely with Pete Binfield... I am sure I was just one of many who was taken completely by surprise by the announcement that Pete is leaving PLoS to start a new project. His partner in this project is Jason Hoyt, up till now Chief Scientist and VP of R&D of Mendeley, also a ScienceOnline veteran. If these two people, some of the best in the business, decide to leave cushy jobs in respected organization to start something new, one sits up and pays attention! ... PeerJ is a new Open Access journal, as well as a new Open Access PrePrint service... PeerJ will open for submissions in Summer 2012, and will publish its first articles in December 2012... Its source of start-up funding is Tim O’Reilly with an initial infusion of $950,000. After that, the journal will support itself from membership fees. They replace publication fees that many TA and OA journals currently charge authors for the publication of their manuscripts. Instead of paying for publication of each paper, authors pay only once and have a lifetime to keep publishing with PeerJ. There are three levels of membership, suitable for people in different institutions, countries, scientific fields, or career stages. The basic $99 plan allows for publication of one paper per year, the $169 price-tag applies to those who expect to publish twice per year, and $259 membership fee is designed for more frequent authors... (as someone quipped: Publish ’till you Perish) ... Very wisely, PeerJ is starting out by targeting the (bio)medical community first. It is this area of research in which the frequency of publication has reached levels best described as ‘madness’... Cost of publishing a few papers by over-producers will be offset by thousands of single-paper authors who will also pay the fee. And even the hyper-frequent authors will not publish all of their stuff in PeerJ – they tend to like to spread their seed around, publishing some stuff in GlamourMagz for reputation, some in the Society journal to appease the friend the editor, some in PLoS ONE for speed when in fear of scooping, and perhaps one or two per year in PeerJ... Now imagine a person who starts publishing as an MS student, moves to a different lab for PhD, another one or two labs for postdocs, then gets hired for a temp job, then finally gets a tenure-track position somewhere else. At each one of those steps, this person persuades collaborators, students and others ... to also sign on in order to publish together. Thus the circle spreads until every scientist on the planet, professional or amateur, old or new, is in the system. And new people keep coming into the system all the time. After all, $99 is a reasonable sum that most can afford to pay and will not resist too hard. Oh, and think about the above paragraph again – does not this process require building and having a, gasp, community? And being able to sell the concept to one’s friends and collaborators? And the pre-print part is open to experimentation – not everything in there needs to look like a traditional paper from the time of print, opening up a possibility that creative people will use the platform to come up with novel ways of reporting their findings, more suited for the 21st century. Brilliant, right? Now let’s hope it works! Time will tell…”