While some might say that scholarly publishing seems to be immune to change, it doesn’t mean the way to fund it can’t be more innovative. That’s one reason why we are pleased to announce that PeerJ now accepts Bitcoin for APC and membership payments.
There are now hundreds of academic articles written about Bitcoin [Google spreadsheet list], yet there has not been a way to make research articles Open Access with the famous digital currency itself. As far as PeerJ is aware, we’re the first academic publisher to start accepting Bitcoin for its peer-reviewed Open Access charges in the life sciences, biology, medicine, and computer science.
How it works for authors
After adding an APC or membership plan to your checkout cart, you’ll be able to review the different payment options: credit card, Bitcoin, and now also Alipay (for authors in China).
If you’re paying by Bitcoin then we’ll provide an address for the transaction and will hold the Bitcoin > USD exchange rate for 10 minutes. If payment has not been made within 10 minutes then the old rate will expire and the screen will automatically update with the latest exchange rate.
@thePeerJ Time to get a GPU for the lab compute cluster.
— David danko (@benchgoblin) April 1, 2016
Now all you need to do to fund a PeerJ Membership or Open Access APC is fire up that old PC and start mining some Bitcoin!
Go blockchain!
And remember that all articles at PeerJ and PeerJ Computer Science are Open Access, meaning free to read and download, forever. These payments go to support Open Access. PeerJ has also partnered with more than 100 universities to create central Open Access funds for eligible researchers.