PeerJ celebrates two year anniversary and opens submissions to PeerJ Computer Science

Since PeerJ began publishing on February 12th 2013, the award winning open access journal has published 760 articles, and over 1,000* PrePrints across all of the life sciences and medicine, culminating in the work of over 4,000 authors. Today not only marks the two-year anniversary of PeerJ publishing articles in the life sciences and medicine, but also the opening of peer-reviewed article submissions to PeerJ’s newly announced journal PeerJ Computer Science. PeerJ are currently offering free publishing credit to anyone registering at PeerJ Computer Science.

All articles published in PeerJ adhere to the original mission of the journal, which is to publish the world’s best research openly to the world at a minimal cost to authors. Authors pay a one time only fee of $99 to publish their work for the rest of their scientific career whilst maintaining ownership of their research through open access CC BY 4.0 licensing.

Jason Hoyt, Co-founder and CEO of PeerJ added “Right from the outset we wanted to offer authors the opportunity to publish in a high quality journal, but at very minimal cost to them. We always felt that if the cost to sequence an entire human genome is nearing the magical $99 goal, then why shouldn’t we be able to publish an article for that as well? In other words, publishing research shouldn’t cost more than actually doing the research in the 21st Century. We are honoured that over 4,000 authors agree with that sentiment too and chose to publish in PeerJ, and we are excited to now be offering this opportunity to authors in computer science with the launch of PeerJ Computer Science.”

After just two years PeerJ is making an impact. In a recent Author Survey 100% of published authors said they would recommend PeerJ to a colleague. Articles and PrePrints in PeerJ have had over one million views and over 4000,000 downloads. With recent articles being covered in globally renowned media outlets such as Scientific American, National Geographic, Boston Globe, Newsweek, Huffington Post, New York Times, The Guardian, Nature and El Pais amongst many others. The discoverability of these articles is also helped by the global indexing services PeerJ is signed up to, including most recently the Web of Science which means that PeerJ is due to receive an early Impact Factor this year.

PeerJ is also working with 131 world-class institutions by offering Institutional Publishing plans that enable the institution to offer free open access publishing for their faculty members. Notable institutions include Cambridge University, Duke University, Max Planck Society, Stanford University and UCLA amongst others.

Peter Binfield, Co-founder and Publisher of PeerJ added “We built PeerJ with the scientific community in mind, and it has been an exciting journey so far in shaping PeerJ to meet their expectations. Our innovative publishing platform and our high quality but low fee ethos is central to what we do, and always will be. We are delighted so many authors are continuing on this journey with us, and by opening up to the computer science community we hope to be able to bring about as much of a sea change as we have been able to do in the biomedical community.”

Note: *816 Unique preprints to which 20% of authors have added multiple versions totalling 1,020 PrePrints to date.