PeerJ pulls off a hat trick « Building Blogs of Science

It is the birthday* of John Backus, Richard Kuhn, Anna Freud, Carlos Juan Finlay, and, why not, Ozzy Osbourne. It is also the day that PeerJ starts receiving manuscript submissions. I talked about PeerJ before and why I was so enthusiastic about its launch.  Some of us academic editors were able to do some website testing for the article submission site, and I have to say I am impressed ...  Then came the electronic submission, and it seems that those who designed those sites knew that our high motivation level to submit would make us be able to endure their site’s, well, unfriendliness (oh and those dreadful pop-up windows!). They were right. Our motivation to submit a paper is high enough that we overlook the nuisance of the submission system – it is not a factor in the decision of where to submit. I find myself sometimes putting an entire afternoon aside just to upload the files on their system, and I have become accustomed to this, I have been doing it for years. And I know that any submission or editorial task will have to wait until I am at my desktop computer because navigating those sites on my netbook or my tablet is, well, not worth the effort.  So needless to say, opening up the PeerJ system was nothing more than a yay moment. Finally someone thought about me, me, me.  The first thing I loved was that I just need to login to my account at PeerJ.com and from there I have the links to whatever I need: my profile, my manuscripts, my reviewer dashboard and my editor dashboard. None of that looking for the email that has the web address for the editorial manager system; even my tired old brain can remember that url. Even better, I can do that from my netbook, my tablet, my mobile phone, because the site loads really nicely in all my devices. The plus side of this is that when I think about checking something I can just go ahead and do it..."