PeerJ Leads A High-Quality, Low-Cost New Breed Of Open-Access Publisher

Mike Taylor | The Guardian | February 12, 2013

A one-off fee allows researchers to publish as many papers as they like. The first open access PeerJ articles appear today

We all know by now that traditional academic publishing is in an appalling mess. Locking publicly funded research behind a paywall is completely unacceptable, and happily our government understands this. The Finch Report has rightly mandated that research must be published as open access. So profiteering publishers, seeing the writing on the wall, are offering authors open-access options.

But corporations addicted to profit margins of 32-42% find it hard to give them up. As a result, while the world's leading open-access journal, PLOS ONE, is able to be financially self-sustaining by charging an article processing fee (APC) of $1,350 (£865) (and offering no-questions-asked waivers to authors without APC funding), the legacy publishers charge significantly more for inferior products. Where PLOS ONE imposes no limits on manuscript length, number of figures, use of colour etc., Elsevier's nearly-open-access articles cost $3,000 despite being limited in all these respects. Likewise, Springer's Open Choice costs $3,000 and Taylor & Francis's Open Select costs $2,950...

Into that landscape come three exciting newcomers that are changing the market much more profoundly than the slow-moving incumbents yet realise. eLIFE is positioned as a highly selective and prestigious open-access alternative to Science and Nature. It published its first articles three months ago. PeerJ is a PLOS ONE-like mega-journal and it publishes its first articles today. Momentum has built further with the announcement of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) last month, a PLOS-like initiative for the humanities and social sciences...