Exciting times! PeerJ secures next round of funding led by SAGE and O’Reilly

by | Jul 9, 2014 | regular

We are pleased to announce that we have secured a new round of funding led by SAGE and O’Reilly. These new investments ensure that we can keep pushing forward the pace of publishing open access articles at a low cost of entry for authors. We still maintain our independent company status, and continue to stand by our mission of enabling authors to publish fast, at minimal cost, with maximum exposure to their research.

SAGE is the one of the world’s leading publishers in science, humanities and social sciences, and their new investment in PeerJ reflects their commitment to exploring innovative publishing models. We are delighted to partner with a publisher that has been such an early advocate for open access publishing. For example, SAGE formed a partnership with Hindawi Publishing Corporation in 2007, and was also a founding board member of OASPA in 2008. They have since launched a number of open access titles – including SAGE Open.

David McCune, non-Executive Director of SAGE will now sit on the PeerJ Board of Directors alongside Tim O’Reilly, CEO and founder of O’Reilly Media, and our two co-founders. McCune commented “I’m proud to be joining PeerJ’s Board of Directors, who share SAGE’s commitment to learning, scholarship and high quality research.”

O’Reilly Media and OATV have supported PeerJ from our inception and their continued support through this second round of funding is testament to their belief in our vision. Tim O’Reilly adds “PeerJ’s vision for a new model of scientific publishing is as fundamentally important now as at the initial outset, and we are committed to ensuring they are able to continue on their path.”

PeerJ has spent the last year demonstrating market fit and strong customer demand and in that time we have published nearly 900 articles across both PeerJ and PeerJ PrePrints representing the work of almost 3,000 authors. At the same time, we have won significant accolades, including the 2013 ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation. This shows that practicing academics consider PeerJ beneficial to both their chosen field and careers, and this hasn’t gone unnoticed by other players within the industry.

With the additional capital from this round we will be able to further develop our offering, as well as promote ourselves much more broadly to the wider academic community. Our authors consistently rank us highest for speed and responsiveness and we are signing up institutions at a pace. We believe that PeerJ is a pioneer in low cost, high speed and high quality scientific publication. We advocate a peer-review process that is rigorous and thorough yet fair, despite the lower entry level costs. Therefore funding support from highly regarded global publishers only goes to validate our belief in this mission.

We are excited by these new developments and thrilled that we can continue to build on our growing success. A big thank you to all the authors that have pioneered with us on our journey so far!

 

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