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PeerJ, A New Open Access Megajournal Launches

Posted by Unknown on from the tim-oreilly-super-hero dept.

Mirk writes "Academic researchers want to make their papers open access for the world to read. If they use traditional publishers like Elsevier, Springer or Taylor & Francis, they'll be charged $3000 to bring their work out from behind the paywall. But PeerJ, a new megajournal launched today and funded by Tim O'Reilly, publishes open access articles for $99. That's not done by cutting corners: the editorial process is thorough, and they use rigorous peer-review. The cost savings come from running lean and mean on a born-digital system. The initial batch of 30 papers includes one on a Penn and Teller trick and one on the long necks of dinosaurs." $99 entitles you to publish an article a year, for life. $300 nets you unlimited articles published per year.

26 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Charging authors is not much better... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Charging authors to publish is not much better than charging people to read the articles. What we truly need is a system that is paid for by universities, cooperatively, that allows anyone to submit a paper and allows anyone to download as many or as few papers as they would like.

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    Palm trees and 8
    1. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The charge is a very small amount. One would think it is ~ 1% of the dollar value of time invested in writing the paper.

      What is achieves is to filter serious papers from frivolous ones and this cuts the total cost of peer reviewing them.

    2. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by ph0rk · · Score: 2

      Allows anyone to submit a paper? Who will review them?

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      semantics are everything!
    3. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by grahamtriggs · · Score: 2

      Even if the publishers were charities (which they aren't) there are still costs that still have to be covered.

      Charging authors doesn't mean that it comes out of the authors personal pockets - generally, the money comes from the university, or more likely, from the funding body that paid for the research to take place.

    4. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Interesting

      hundred bucks isn't that much though, if others will consider this a "real" journal.
      anyone can publish anything with practically no costs right now as well.

      if the paper is really groundbreaking that would be enough, to upload it even on pastebin. very few papers are that groundbreaking though.

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      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Informative

      Volunteers, which is basically what we do now. Anyone can submit a paper to the journals my group publishes in, and if the paper meets the requirements, it will be reviewed by volunteers, and if it is accepted it will be edited by volunteers too.

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      Palm trees and 8
    6. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by sribe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In other words, we still have some of the problems that open access should solve. While we no longer have the issue of individuals being unable to access knowledge, we are still saying that research can only be done by those with university affiliations or who are wealthy.

      A $99 one-time fee does not limit this to the "wealthy". If you can't afford $99, you're not likely to be able to do any meaningful research either.

    7. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by Mprx · · Score: 2

      You can do meaningful mathematics research with nothing but pencil and paper. Filtering out frivolous submissions is a worthwhile goal, but the fee should be adjusted according to the author's ability to pay.

    8. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by dkf · · Score: 2

      Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service

      The principal valid costs relate to storage and the provision of an access service, with the costs of operation covered for the next hundred years or so. It's easy to say "but these could be provided for free" but is quite a different story if you've got to guarantee access for that long; with volunteers, it's very easy to end up with nobody storing anything and the data just getting lost completely. You're also unlikely to persuade most university libraries to let anyone outside of their faculty access their collections (except under a quid pro quo arrangement); any general service has to be paid for and it has to be provisioned with cash to cover long term access. Storage costs are decreasing over time, and if you can afford to store for 10 years it's (probably) not that much more to make it to 50 or 100, but it's not free.

      Whether all that should really cost $5000 or whatever, I wouldn't like to comment. I just would hate to trust the magic of free for anything very long term. (Heck, we can't even reliably keep all published versions of a piece of open-source software for 20 years.)

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      "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
    9. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by Mirk · · Score: 2

      Check the PeerJ site. Peer-reviewers are chosen by an academic editor -- standard practice at scholarly journals. There is a board of 800 academic editors (PeerJ's planning to get big, quickly). That large board is overseen by a much smaller senior board to 20 scientists (of whom five have Nobel prizes to their names). It's serious stuff.

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    10. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by Mirk · · Score: 2

      I agree that what we really want is a system where the price of publishing is part of the price of doing research. That is what we're moving towards as funding bodies increasingly allow publication fees to be covered by their grants. But even without this, charging to publish is much better than charging to read, because it's a non-monopoly market. When Elsevier charge $40 to read one of their articles, a reader doesn't have the choice of going to a different publisher: no other publisher has the specific article the reader needs. But when they charge $3000 to publish my article I can go to any rival that offers similar services, and find one that instead charges $1350 (PLOS ONE) or $99 (PeerJ).

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      One hundred and twenty chars!
      Too short for haiku.
    11. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by bWareiWare.co.uk · · Score: 2

      The is no requirement that the author pays, only that someone dose. Authors who can't afford $99 only have to find someone who believes their paper is worth at least that.

    12. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Informative

      Charging authors to publish is not much better than charging people to read the articles

      Every journal I am aware of that uses any kind of peer review process does this. This system, however, is a lot cheaper. I recently publised in PLoS ONE and I had to pay around $1,500 for that. I really hope these guys can keep their publication costs down and manage to acquire some prestige so they get indexed in relevant places.

      What we truly need is a system that is paid for by universities, cooperatively, that allows anyone to submit a paper and allows anyone to download as many or as few papers as they would like.

      Some journals have tried that - look at the institutional memberships at PLoS (my institution is not a member) and BioMedCentral for example - the problem with that though is that memberships like that would usually be paid for by the school libraries and quite nearly every school in this country is trying to reduce their library expenditures.

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      Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    13. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by slew · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't know about PeerJ specifically, but typically the editor (or more generally, editorial board desginees) for the journal selects the specific reviewer(s) for a paper. They don't just hold up a paper and ask for volunteers for a specific paper. To execute the strategy of signing up a bunch of shills and hoping that the editor will randomly select them, and nobody who would actually do a legitimate peer-review, is probably not going to be a very good long term strategy if the editors aren't in cahoots, although it might occasionally work for a very obscure topic.

      On the other hand, that's no worse than the situation today (the more obsure the research, the more cooperative backscratching there is).

      The bigger problem I see is how to entice quality peer-review volunteers. Traditional Journals entice peer-reviewers by offering stuff like book vouchers, or free access for a few weeks per reviewed article and/or free access to all references in the paper during the peer review duration. If it costs nothing to access the journal, these traditional enticements don't have any value. As I understand it, to make up for this, they are forcing members to "volunteer" to review at least 1 time per year (or at least comment on a public submission). I don't see how this would be very effective out of the gate, but as with the /. moderation system, I'm sure it will be tweaked over time...

      FWIW, it seems that PeerJ is apparently currently only Biology and Medical Science Journal (not a true megajournal). Journals in those fields tend to have the most egregious pricing scales and have the most annoying editorial boards (because there are limited publishing options). I'm sure that's a deliberate marketing ploy (hit the Journal industry where it's the most vunerable).

    14. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by interkin3tic · · Score: 2

      According to their FAQ, they're only publishing biological and medical research. You can do some meaningful research on bioinformatics with just a computer I suppose, but really, most of the research, $100 is going to be insignificant. And there's nothing to say they wouldn't waive the fee if you absolutely couldn't pay it.

    15. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by supercrisp · · Score: 2

      "Volunteer" has an odd meaning in the context of scholarly publication. I "volunteer" my services at three journals. I definitely would not do anything for one, maybe two, of them if it were not for the fact that such labor is required by the university that employees. So this is not an entirely voluntary sort of volunteering.

    16. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by supercrisp · · Score: 2

      The smallness of the amount is relative. My family of two academics clears about $200 a month, and we don't own a home, have car payments, cable payments, nor do we make any retirement contributions (and we're in our 40s). In other words, we live as cheaply as possible and are not in a good economic situation. And this fee would knock out a half of what we can save in a month. Of course, ideally, university's would cover the fees charged to their faculty for such publications, and that would likely be the case at most universities.

    17. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by gwolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Right, it can be seen as part of your task as an academic. The extra income I get from teaching is very little, but it is part of what an academic should do. Reviewing does not give me money at all (although it marginally publicizes my name), so it's also part of my tasks as an academic.

    18. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by naroom · · Score: 2

      You can do meaningful mathematics research with nothing but pencil and paper.

      You're thinking of philosophers. Mathematicians need a pencil, paper, and a trash can.

    19. Re:Charging authors is not much better... by njvack · · Score: 2

      For what it's worth, I was tangentially part of an effort in the University of Wisconsin Libraries to publish the open-access Journal of Insect Science. After perhaps a year of doing that, we looked at the actual costs and found that, IIRC, $30-$100/page are not actually unreasonable costs. Yes, there's a large variance.

      "How," you ask, "could it possibly cost so much to produce an open-access journal? The author is working for free! The reviewers are working for free!" Well:

      • The reviewers are generally not particularly excited to spend their time reviewing papers. They often say "sure" and then just never do the work. So you need to keep on them, and swap them out for other editors when they flake out. You need to do this without giving them a sad.
      • Different reviewers have different areas of expertise. So you need to match the content of the article to suitable reviewers. Your editor should do this, but probably isn't getting paid for that effort, and so you may need to keep on him/her to get that to actually happen.
      • Your authors don't know how to use word processing tools or graphic design tools. You'll get horribly-formatted documents, figures as 36-DPI .GIFs, strange-looking Powerpoint god-knows-whats, and gigantic tables that will never look good anywhere. Your job is to either guess at what the authors meant to do, reformat materials, and send them back for approval, or get your authors to re-do their stuff.
      • Authors also routinely ignore things like word count limits and organization guidelines.
      • While you're primarily targeting the Web, a good-looking print copy is still widely-valued. So you probably need to handle your layout nightmares twice.
      • Sometimes, people want to do Something Innovative with regard to data vis. After all, you're online, so you should be able to make this interactive, right? So, you need to decide if you want to try and implement this innovative thing (and what does that look like in print, anyhow?) or say "no, sorry, we can't make your research look super neat."
      • Online repositories work best with specially-marked-up XML. There are tools and services that will do this for you, but they all cost time, money, or both. XSLT to turn your XML into HTML or PDF can be made to automatically give you a product that is not quite nice enough to present to the outside world -- there are usually some special cases that want hand-massaging.
      • Both faculty and grad students can, at times, act like complete jerks and require a bunch of time in damage-control.

      I could go on, but you get the idea. The bottom line was that we found PLOSOne's costs to be broadly reasonable (also: did you know you can essentially say "I don't want to pay" and... not pay?). Maybe it would be possible to undercut them by a factor of two with real work in process management, but generally: there's a bunch of grunt work turning researchers' paper submissions into a good quality journal. And you could get really fast at formatting, but time for catherding and massaging egos (so you don't lose your reviewers) scales linearly with the number of articles you publish.

  2. Biological and Medical Sciences only by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the FAQ :

    What subject areas do you cover:

    PeerJ considers submissions of Research Articles in the Biological and Medical Sciences (this scope includes, for example, disciplines such as the life & biological sciences; biotechnology; basic medical sciences; medical specialties; health sciences and other similar fields).

  3. Peer review is not paid work by gwolf · · Score: 2

    When I have reviewed papers for a refereed journal, I have not been paid. The most "pay" I get is to be mentioned as part of the "scientific committee" for that particular number of the journal.
    Of course, the journals should choose who gets to be a reviewer — If I have reviewed something, it is because I have submitted works there that were published, and were deemed worthy of being a reviewer.
    Now, there *can* be a journal where the author doesn't pay, the reviewers get only credit, and the readers don't pay. That can be achieved either with publicity, or by foregoing commercial interest and having the publication be a part of a university's mission/academic contributions. Many such publications exist.

  4. Third world countries... Have a wild variety! by gwolf · · Score: 2

    I live in Mexico, which is often qualified as a third world country. Yes, we are way closer than European living standards than to Subsaharan Africa's — But we are still "third world".
    In a university, there are myriads of different programs that can be requested to fund a research project. In my university, the two main programs for that (PAPIME and PAPIIT) grant the researcher upon the project approval starting at around US$17,000 a year for up to three years, to be used in project-related activities (travelling to conferences, hiring interns, buying equipment, or, yes, publishing papers). And that is the *smallest* amount, it can get to three times that.
    So, in this portion of the third world... US$99 is not *so* terrible. Of course, you can still publish without a formal project approval (and that's what I have usually done), but it will be harder to do so in the author-pays journals.

    1. Re:Third world countries... Have a wild variety! by sribe · · Score: 2

      So, in this portion of the third world... US$99 is not *so* terrible. Of course, you can still publish without a formal project approval (and that's what I have usually done), but it will be harder to do so in the author-pays journals.

      Especially since it's $99 for life, not per paper, not even per year.

  5. I have a theory by mdsolar · · Score: 2

    All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine, and what it is too. --Ann Elk, An expert

  6. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You seem to oddly leave out the review process. Anyone can host random papers on the web for very little money, and stick an official sounding name on it. That was true even before the open access thing gained momentum, and really has nothing to do with open access at all.

    It all comes down to quality and consistency. This depends heavily on the review process, and how well it is managed. But once you've established a record of doing that well, the readership, citations, and better submissions will follow. You might not be dethroning the top journals that have decades or centuries of tradition keeping them at the top of their fields, but there is a lot of room for solid, second tier journals.

    And speaking from experience, the majority of the effort isn't about getting it up on the web, but managing the review process. It is one thing to volunteer to write a review for a specific paper when asked to. To be in charge of finding reviewers, keeping them on track, and dealing with the disagreements is a whole different mess, especially with some sort of standards of quality. Between that and trying to fix an author's wonky LaTeX so it formats correctly, $100 sounds like a good deal, as I would need to be paid more than that to do such work like that again.