More PeerJ musings

“Buried in the PeerJ FAQ is a brief discussion of what happens to articles with a lot of authors: pay for the first twelve authors, the rest come free! Coming from information studies, the Loon hadn’t thought of that angle—four authors is alot for an LIS paper—but in biomedicine, it’s a genuine issue. The Loon has no grounds to quibble with PeerJ’s solution… but it did send her mind off in the direction of the intersection of author lists, interdisciplinarity, and PeerJ’s business model. Research is becoming more interdisciplinary, we keep being told. Whatever the reasons for this... it means that the disciplinary boundaries around PeerJ are… porous, shall we say... This means, among other things, that the universe of potential paying PeerJ members is emphatically not limited to those who are primarily identified with PeerJ’s initial subject foci. Anyone in any discipline who is a collaborator with someone in the primary target market may also become a paying member for a coauthored article! That’s clever of PeerJ. It’s got to reduce their cost of author and article acquisition... It also means that PeerJ doesn’t have to guess about when and where to expand its disciplinary coverage. It will have actual evidence to work from... This distinguishes PeerJ usefully from some of the PLoS One imitators launched in early 2011, who hadn’t a lick of market research behind them as far as the Loon can tell. This isn’t just clever, it’s brilliant. Piggybacking growth on patterns that emerge organically from affiliation and collaboration networks makes total sense—it’s one of those ideas that’s painfully obvious in hindsight... Taking the Clayton Christensen view, too, PeerJ may have found the “underserved clientele” that are the mainstay of any business-disruption attempt. Who is underserved by the current system of chopping knowledge into ever-tinier domains, the way journals do? Why, interdisciplinary scholars, of course...PeerJ can morph to fit emerging needs in a way most journals can’t... The addition of the preprint server is another clever touch... the problem with a lot of the ‘social networking for academe’ experiments is that most academics need object-oriented social networks. The only individual-oriented ‘networking’ they do is in the form of their online CVs, and the pathetic rate at which those are updated is a fair reflection of how important academics don’t think such networking is. Can PeerJ build a working community from its preprint server, plus allied services such as alt-metrics and open review? Will PeerJ’s (likely) increasingly interdisciplinary reach introduce the idea of preprints to fields that don’t currently rely on them? Who knows? But it’s got a better chance at success than academia.edu or institutional repositories ever did. PeerJ has learned from arXiv to put a small barrier in front of the preprint server to keep the whackadoodles (mostly) out. It’s a price barrier rather than arXiv’s ‘have a community member vouch for you’ barrier; the contrast should be instructive over time... SSRN offers a service or two that PeerJ might profitably adopt; the branded series comes to mind immediately. Quite a few law, political science, and business schools pay SSRN to brand a series of working papers or preprints. This ‘branding’ often doesn’t even extend to a coherent visual identity! It’s just scoped search/browse plus slapping a series title/link on the page somewhere—the tech burden is ludicrously small... Lastly, worth noting: PeerJ, like Figshare before it, is acting responsibly with respect to preserving the content of its publications. It is depositing to PubMedCentral, and is joining the CLOCKSS network... PeerJ is not. Whatever else they are or may become, they’re not being stupid. The Loon finds their lack of stupidity rather refreshing.”