PeerJ Publishes scientific articles open access within Biological and Medical sciences. Articles are available online to no cost for the reader. Their goal is to decrease publishing costs, to improve the publishing process while giving both the authors are readers a publishing channel which is adjusted to present-day demands: quick, simple, accessible while maintaining high quality. They support several financial plans to make sure researchers’ have possibility to publish with them. Also, PeerJ has a preprint archive for articles not published or peer reviewed just yet.
PeerJ chooses articles for publishing based on the scientific and methodological soundness instead of subjective opinions on perceived impact, novelty or interest.
They have been operational six months and have written a short review of these past months. They have published 130 articles and some of the have received more than 20 000 views. PeerJ has also made sure that the articles are archived and preserved. What is good news is that many of the reviewers are open with their names and a growing number of researchers are attaching review history to their publication, meaning that the comments articles has gotten from the reviewers are made public. Open review process is not new. E.g. Nature has tried it and in 2006 they wrote an article of the experiment. Blog post about ultra-open peer review is interesting reading showing what open review process could give to the article, discourse and the research in general.
PeerJ gives 6 reasons why the next article should be published with them: 1) open access, 2) rigorous review, 3) affordable, 4) fast publishing, 5) author in control and 6) tomorrows publishing today. Only problem is that for now it only publishes research with in Biological and Medical Sciences…
Pieta Eklund