PeerJ's $99 open access model one year on | News | Times Higher Education

"When, in 2012, a new open access biomedical journal with a peculiar name and a smirking blue monkey for a mascot announced that it would let academics publish a paper a year for a one-off fee of just $99 (£59), some observers checked that it was not April Fool’s Day. One goal of the open access movement had always been to slash the amount of money universities transferred to publishers’ coffers. Yet even Plos One, the previous 'darling' of open access advocates, felt the need to charge authors $1,350 per article. Yet here was that journal’s former publisher, Peter Binfield, proclaiming that PeerJ could do even more for vastly less. Kent Anderson, chief executive and publisher of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, wrote in a Scholarly Kitchen blog soon after the announcement that 'after scooping my brain back into my skull once I’d absorbed this apparently foolhardy approach to cash flow and sustainability…it began to dawn on me that perhaps what PeerJ is headed toward is more akin to a freemium model, like WordPress, where you can publish for free if you accept limited functionality and some Google ads, or you can pay premium fees to get rid of the ads and get more robust functionality'. PeerJ did announce higher fees of $199 for the right to publish two papers a year and $299 for unlimited publishing rights. And the fact that the papers it publishes average four and a half authors also pushes up the average cost of publishing a first paper to nearly $450, even on the cheapest plan. But Mr Anderson’s expectation that the journal would charge extra fees for everything from peer review to search engine optimisation has not been realised. Speaking last month on the first anniversary of the publication of PeerJ’s first article, Dr Binfield also pointed to the rave reviews that its publication platform and customer service had received. A recent author survey indicated that 91 per cent of authors had had an 'above average' publishing experience, with 42 per cent rating it 'one of the best I have ever had', he said. 'We are proving that it is entirely possible to have a world-class publication experience at a rock-bottom price' ..."