Category Archives: oa.peerj

Work at PeerJ – Publishing Editor (new role)

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“PeerJ is an award-winning, open access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal publisher covering many academic disciplines (including biology, life science, medicine, environmental science, computer science and chemistry). We have a staff vacancy for an experienced Publishing Editor to support and grow our journal program. This senior position will operate at a high level in the company and participate in initiatives to grow and develop the editorial program (i.e. it is focused on editorial strategies and content development). In addition, the role will help maintain an effective quality control and peer review process and will involve frequent interactions with academics worldwide. This role works closely with internal teams and the external Academic Editors and peer-reviewers of our peer-reviewed journal publications. It is initially focused on ‘field biology’ areas such as ecology, plant sciences, and zoology but will expand to cover other areas as needed. Starting immediately, this is a full-time position working from home with flexible working hours. Note: We are also hiring for a more junior role (of ‘Staff Editor’) at https://peerj.com/expertrxiv/823 -This Staff Editor position will work alongside the Publishing Editor.”

PeerJ at 10: revisiting our first articles, one decade – and 16,041 articles – later. – PeerJ Blog

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10 years ago we published our first articles. PeerJ was announced to the world in June 2012; 5 months later, at the end of November 2012, we launched our own submission and peer review platform; and 3 months after that, on February 12th, 2013, the first 30 articles were published. In the decade since their publication, those articles have accrued 896 citations and over 300,000 views.

PeerJ at 10: now ALL PeerJ articles will be published with their entire peer review history – PeerJ Blog

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“Since PeerJ’s launch 10 years ago we have championed Open Peer Review by offering authors the option to publish their peer review reports (“Published Peer Review” or “Open Reports”). We believe that Published Peer Review leads to a more constructive and collegial process; that the reviewer reports and editorial decisions constitute an important part of the scientific record; and they provide a way for reviewers (if they choose) and editors to be publicly credited for their important contribution. 

Since we launched, the majority of authors have chosen to publish their peer review history in its entirety; we have published the peer review reports and editor decisions of over 9,800 articles, equating to around 60% of our total output. Published Peer Review has not, however, become the “norm” as we had hoped.

The 12th February 2023 marks an important milestone for PeerJ, as it will be 10 years since we published our first articles. It will also be the last day that new submissions will be presented with an option to publish their peer review history in full.

From February 13th onwards, ALL new submissions, if accepted for publication, will have their peer review reports and decision letters published alongside the article….”

PeerJ and Peer Community in

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We are delighted to announce that we are extending our “journal friendliness” to all Peer Communities in, or PCIs. Authors that achieve a positive final recommendation from one of the 15 PCIs can now submit to PeerJ or PeerJ Computer Science and, as long as their submission meets our editorial criteria,  journal policies and scope, they will be accepted for publication without further peer review.

The 15 PCIs

The PCI association is a not-for-profit and non-commercial organization created in December 2016. Its members are scientists, and it is managed by scientists, for scientists. The 15 communities of researchers review and recommend articles posted on preprint servers and other open-access repositories.

PeerJ has been a PCI friendly publisher for PCI Registered Reports since last year. Being a PCI friendly publisher aligns with our aims and ethos by serving different research communities, responding positively and cooperatively to the way they want to publish their science. We are excited to be a part of this initiative and to be able to offer the communities an option to rapidly publishing their research.

Authors who wish to submit their PCI recommended article to PeerJ should add a note to the “Confidential Information for PeerJ Staff” field stating they have received a positive PCI recommendation and including the DOI of the recommendation. Our team will then work with the author and the PCI Recommender to accept the article without further review, subject to the authors paying the applicable article processing charge or being PeerJ Lifetime Members.

PCI authors who are considering choosing PeerJ to publish their article are welcome to contact the PeerJ Communities Team with any questions before submitting.

We also welcome applications from PCI Recommenders to join our Editorial Board. You can find more details here.

PeerJ and Peer Community in

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We are delighted to announce that we are extending our “journal friendliness” to all Peer Communities in, or PCIs. Authors that achieve a positive final recommendation from one of the 15 PCIs can now submit to PeerJ or PeerJ Computer Science and, as long as their submission meets our editorial criteria,  journal policies and scope, they will be accepted for publication without further peer review.

The 15 PCIs

The PCI association is a not-for-profit and non-commercial organization created in December 2016. Its members are scientists, and it is managed by scientists, for scientists. The 15 communities of researchers review and recommend articles posted on preprint servers and other open-access repositories.

PeerJ has been a PCI friendly publisher for PCI Registered Reports since last year. Being a PCI friendly publisher aligns with our aims and ethos by serving different research communities, responding positively and cooperatively to the way they want to publish their science. We are excited to be a part of this initiative and to be able to offer the communities an option to rapidly publishing their research.

Authors who wish to submit their PCI recommended article to PeerJ should add a note to the “Confidential Information for PeerJ Staff” field stating they have received a positive PCI recommendation and including the DOI of the recommendation. Our team will then work with the author and the PCI Recommender to accept the article without further review, subject to the authors paying the applicable article processing charge or being PeerJ Lifetime Members.

PCI authors who are considering choosing PeerJ to publish their article are welcome to contact the PeerJ Communities Team with any questions before submitting.

We also welcome applications from PCI Recommenders to join our Editorial Board. You can find more details here.

PeerJ welcomes Western University to our Three Year Publishing Memberships program

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We are delighted to announce that Western University, Canada, has joined our Three-Year Fixed Term Memberships Program. Western is the latest institution to sign up to the program which offers an innovative alternative to Article Processing Charges for Open Access. Under the agreement, the cost of Three-Year Memberships for Western University-affiliated authors are waived, meaning no out-of-pocket fees for faculty members to publish in PeerJ’s seven journals. 

“Open access publishing is a priority for Western Libraries, and we are pleased to now offer the PeerJ membership to our researchers. We are committed to supporting cost-effective open access initiatives where our faculty are contributing or publishing. We want to make open access publishing more accessible to our researchers, and PeerJ is helping us do that,” writes Kristin Hoffmann, Research and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Western Libraries. 

Western University and Western Libraries are clearly committed to the principles of Open Access, as well as innovative, cost-effective routes to open publishing such as our Three-Year Memberships program. We are excited to welcome Western to the PeerJ community and look forward to working with their researchers across our seven journals. They are the fifth institution to provide Three Year Membership as an Open Access option to their faculty, following the University of California, Berkeley, University of Ottawa, Iowa State University and the University of Sussex. 

Compared to the astronomical APC fees of many other publishers, Memberships provide great value for money, and allow more authors to publish Open Access. We remain committed to promoting Memberships as the low-cost, sustainable alternative to Article Processing Charge, and welcome inquiries about the program from other universities. PeerJ Three Year Fixed Term Memberships, priced at $239 per author, are valid from the date of an author’s first publication and for a further 36 months, during which they can publish a total of three articles at any point, giving authors more flexibility as to when, and how often, they publish. When authors use their full complement of three publications, the per-author cost borne by Western averages out at under $80/article. Under the agreement, all co-authors must hold a PeerJ Membership in order to publish; any Memberships previously held by Western-affiliated authors remain valid. Authors can still choose to pay via APC fees if they prefer. 

GigaScience and GigaByte Groups Join Sciety

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Over the last month, we have added two new groups, GigaScience and GigaByte, from the journals of the same name, increasing the number of specialist teams displaying their evaluations on Sciety.

GigaScience and GigaByte are part of GigaScience Press. With a decade-long history of open-science publishing, they aim to revolutionise publishing by promoting reproducibility of analyses and data dissemination, organisation, understanding, and use. As open-access and open-data journals, they publish all research objects (publishing data, software and workflows) from ‘big data’ studies across the life and biomedical sciences. These resources are managed using the FAIR Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which state that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. They also follow the practices of transparency and openness in science publishing, and as such, they embrace open peer review (which is mandated for both journals) and preprints (which are strongly encouraged in GigaScience and mandated for GigaByte). The opportunities for combining both are covered by GigaScience in its video on open science and preprint peer review for Peer Review Week.

 

PeerJ Tokens – Rewarding Peer Review

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We want to rethink how you are rewarded for your contribution to peer review. We want to address the question of the unrewarded labor you provide to scientific communication and we want to lower prices that are creating barriers to Open Access. We want to make it easier for anyone to contribute and we want to make open accessible for all.

Now, when you contribute to PeerJ as a reviewer or academic editor, you will earn PeerJ Tokens. Tokens can be exchanged for discounts on our Article Processing Charge.

Updated open access publishing agreements | Library | University of Ottawa

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“The University of Ottawa Library is pleased to announce updated open access publishing agreements with the following three publishers: PeerJ, PLOS, and SAGE.

Authors affiliated with the University of Ottawa may publish in PeerJ with a Three-Year (Limited Term) Basic Membership. Funded by the Library, the membership allows for authors to publish up to three articles at no cost at any time within a three-year period (provided all co-authors on an article have an appropriate PeerJ membership).

 

The Library, along with 18 other Canadian institutions, is also participating in PLOS’ Communication Action Publishing Program. Through this program, affiliated corresponding and contributing authors can benefit from no-fee publishing in PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology.

 

Finally, thanks to a nationally negotiated agreement with SAGE, authors may be eligible for a discount or a waiver on article processing charges (APCs) for participating journals. Authors who publish in eligible SAGE Choice journals may do so free of charge and authors publishing in SAGE’s fully open access journals can receive a 40% discount on APCs for participating journals….”

University of Ottawa signs agreement with PeerJ for innovative new Institutional Author Membership model to fund Open Access

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“We are delighted to announce that University of Ottawa have signed up to an innovative new approach to fund Open Access publishing. Funded by the University of Ottawa Library, authors affiliated with the University of Ottawa may publish in PeerJ journals using a new Three-Year Membership; the Membership allows authors to publish up to three articles at any time within a three-year period….”

University of Ottawa signs agreement with PeerJ for innovative new Institutional Author Membership model to fund Open Access

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“We are delighted to announce that University of Ottawa have signed up to an innovative new approach to fund Open Access publishing. Funded by the University of Ottawa Library, authors affiliated with the University of Ottawa may publish in PeerJ journals using a new Three-Year Membership; the Membership allows authors to publish up to three articles at any time within a three-year period….”

A funny thing happened on the way to the Shiny Digital Future | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

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“What would I change about peer review? Since it launched, PeerJ has let reviewers either review anonymously, or sign their reviews, and it has let authors decide whether or not to publish the reviews alongside the paper. Those were both pretty daring steps at the time, but if I could I’d turn both of those into mandates rather than options. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I think almost all of the abuses of the peer review system would evaporate if reviewers had to sign their reviews, and all reviews were published alongside the papers. There will always be a-holes in the world, and some of them are so pathological that they can’t rein in their bad behavior, but if the system forced them to do the bad stuff in the open, we’d all know who they are and we could avoid them….”

 

Partner with PeerJ to build a new ecosystem for society publishing

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Earlier this year we wrote about a renewed focus on community at PeerJ. This post is the first in a series on new programs and innovations we’re launching at PeerJ as part of our community development. 

In this post we:

  • Consider the pressures on scholarly societies and their members in the current landscape
  • Describe new publishing opportunities at PeerJ for societies and member associations
  • Call for partners to help us build a new and productive ecosystem for society publishing

A recurring theme in our research in the Communities Team has been the future of scholarly societies. Whether it’s authors choosing to publish with us to meet OA requirements their society cannot fulfill; concerns from society board members about slowly but steadily falling membership and financial reserves (exacerbated by conferences cancelled this year and next due to COVID-19); or societies wanting to launch and manage an OA journal, but put off by the complexity, cost and ongoing investment to maintain and sustain a fledgling title: the current dynamics in STM publishing can make life difficult for societies, especially smaller membership organizations. Meanwhile, the focus of many publishers has been on alternative business models and transformative deals at the institutional/funder level. 

Here at PeerJ we believe that scholarly societies and the communities they support and develop are vital to a thriving academic and research ecosystem, so we are hoping to offer an opportunity to societies and a solution to many of their concerns. 

Society Publishing with PeerJx

We are currently seeking partners to co-develop a new ecosystem for societies that we believe can answer many of the concerns we have heard. Our first step towards this new ecosystem is to develop PeerJx. 

Inspired by the relationship between TED and TEDx events, PeerJx focuses on local research communities and membership organizations. PeerJx partner sites are built on PeerJ’s journal portfolio, platform and infrastructure, but partners have their own editorial responsibilities and community development opportunities. Partners and their members benefit from the platform, service and reputation of PeerJ – and our highly-regarded portfolio of indexed, peer-reviewed journals – with the opportunity to build their own publication pathway, increase their member numbers, and develop their community and opportunities for them to interact.

PeerJx is designed around choice and flexibility for our partners. We know one size won’t fit everyone, so partners can integrate their own branding, and choose the editorial model, community tools, website configuration and even business model to create a bespoke publishing outlet best suited to their organization and members. 

Choose your journals

Choose to partner with PeerJ and you can choose which PeerJ journals to build into your PeerJx publishing pathway. 

PeerJx removes the administrative effort and cost of launching a new journal, and allows your members to submit to the highly regarded and indexed journals in PeerJ’s portfolio. Our journals’ excellent reputation, broad audience and high-quality peer review standards means your members can submit to your PeerJx knowing their research will be highly visible, widely disseminated, indexed in all the important databases and responsibly archived. Your members can choose to submit to any of our seven journals.

Choose your editorial model

Choose to take control of your publishing pathway. Partners can choose to form their own Senior Editorial Team and Editorial Board, and choose whether they want to curate content including blogs, news and announcements into their PeerJx site alongside their community’s research articles. There are three initial PeerJx editorial models:

Choose to reduce publishing costs for your members

Members of partner organizations submitting to their society’s PeerJx will enjoy a discount on our standard Article Processing Charges, or can purchase of one of our PeerJ Membership packages.

Partners can also choose to take collective action to reduce the cost of publishing for their members. Partner societies have the option to choose from a sliding scale of annual contributions – based on the size of their membership – to reduce article processing charges for their members. 

We anticipate developing business models in tandem with prospective partners to ensure the publishing with PeerJ is as accessible as possible. Our aim is to eliminate cost as a barrier to partners from participating.

As the PeerJ Partner Publishing Program develops and grows we intend to build models and revenue streams that will result in reductions to the publishing costs for Partners’ Members and profit shares with Partner organizations.

Choose to partner with PeerJ

We want to build an accessible, equitable solution for societies and members organizations seeking their own publishing outlet – or an Open Access option to compliment their current publications – without the cost and administrative burden of launching and maintaining a new journal. The PeerJ Partner Publishing Program and the PeerJx concept are still in their nascency and we hope partners will choose to work with us to help develop the program and its core concepts to ensure they meet your requirements.

Want to find out more?

If you’d like to find out more, you can download the PeerJ Partner Publishing Program prospectus here. We’d love to have the opportunity to talk through in more detail what societies would want from such a partnership – we want to develop the core concepts with prospective partners so we build something they want and need. If you’d like to help us develop a new and flourishing ecosystem for open access society publishing please get in touch: nathaniel.gore@peerj.com