Is PeerJ Membership Publishing Sustainable?

“Discussions about open access publishing usually converge on two topical issues: 1) morality (fairness, justice, social welfare); or 2) sustainability. This post is about the latter. More specifically, this post is about PeerJ’s innovative membership publishing model... In this post, I’ll attempt to unpack their business model, explore the details, and try to come to an understanding of how this model will play out in the marketplace. ‘Lifetime membership’ is a term that is being used widely by the company and the media to describe the PeerJ business model, and yet I think the term is being used inappropriately here, ‘Pay once, publish for life’ does not seem to apply if you read the second condition under PeerJ’s pricing plans: ‘If you choose not to perform at least one review every 12 months, then at our discretion your membership will lapse and you will need to pay $99 to reactivate your membership the next time you want to publish with PeerJ...‘ In the case of PeerJ, these ‘lifetime membership’ fees are more like ‘club entrance fees’ or ‘initiation fees...’ The first condition of publishing is that every author must be a PeerJ member. While PeerJ caps the total number of paying authors to 12, we should be hesitant to equate this with an inexpensive publishing model. The average number of biomedical authors per paper has been rising steadily since the 1950s, and MEDLINE/PubMed reports that the average number of authors per indexed paper now exceeds five. What’s more, the average number of author recurrence is also rising. Some authors are listed on hundreds, even thousands, of papers. Requiring that each author pays membership fees creates a disincentive for honorary authorship — bestowing authorship on those who don’t satisfy authorship criteria. On the other hand, such a requirement encourages ghost authorship – ignoring those who should be acknowledged. In the biomedical sciences, papers get published months (or sometimes years) after a graduate student, technician, or postdoc has left the lab. Getting these authors signed up as members in good standing may be more difficult to do... Moreover, you have just committed them to lifetime labor to PeerJ unless they don’t care about their membership lapsing. Lifetime publishing also comes with severe production limits. For the Basic Plan (starting at $99), authors can publish no more than one paper per year. For the Enhanced Plan (starting at $169), authors can publish just two. If you want to publish any more, you’ll need to invest in the Investigator Plan (starting at $259). Let’s price out a new manuscript... A paper contains six authors: the first is the postdoc ($169), the second and third are technicians (2 x $169), the fourth is a graduate student ($99), the fifth is the PI ($259), and the sixth is the chair of the department ($259). Grand total = $1,124. This is in the ballpark of PLoS ONE and other similar open access journals. What’s more, I didn’t include the fact that the prices cited are based on introductory rates that are slated to increase come September 1, 2012... The billing process is going to be tricky for PeerJ. Instead of charging one author one publication fee (like PLoS ONE), PeerJ will need to verify many individual membership payments... Elsevier and Springer and Wiley like to deal with institutions — or better, consortia of institutions... If PeerJ cannot find savings in administrating peer review, it has to find it somewhere, and they are moving in exactly the wrong direction. Financial administration is not going to come cheaply... My last topic is about how membership duties — specifically, reviewing or commenting — will help to create or undermine the community PeerJ is hopeful to create... I’m going to assume that PeerJ’s goal is to build a real, vibrant, and collegial community that will translate into bringing in new paying members... There are two problems with this approach. First, changing the incentives for providing voluntary labor (reviewing and commenting) may result in lowering the quality of that work. In order to remain a PeerJ member, you have to either continue to submit papers, review others, or leave post-publication comments. It says nothing about competence. Peer review doesn’t need bodies, it needs competent peers. Attracting those peers will be the most difficult challenge of PeerJ. Second, and more importantly, a community of informed reciprocity requires that a large community be built quickly in order to take advantage of the social network effects. Initially, when the community is small, it may be very difficult to enlist a competent member-reviewer for a submitted manuscript ... Without any new income models, the lifetime membership model of PeerJ creates a challenging sigmoidal curve. Once growth starts slowing down and the company starts nearing the asymptote, it will spend more and more and bring in less and less. The company will look good in their early stages of growth, and this is when most startups do one of two things — sell big and move on, or cash out and leave a decaying company to a bunch of sto