PeerJ comparison

If you need to email us for assistance, we'll respond within a few hours (if within USA west-coast working hours) or at most within 1 working day.

All in-house editorial staff are highly responsive, engaged and supportive. We're proud to say that many authors thank our journal staff by name in our post-publication feedback surveys!

We're active and engaged on Twitter, open to discussions and support requests.

We use Freshdesk to manage your support emails (used by DHL, Toshiba, Honda etc.). A ticket is created every time you contact us, enabling us to respond quickly and effectively to your query.

Most journals use off-the-shelf software you'll recognize. It's clunky, frustrating and feels decades old! PeerJ is custom designed and developed in-house using the same modern tools and approach as Google and Facebook.

And like these modern websites, we prioritize making submitting as easy and enjoyable as possible. Submitting your article doesn't have to be painful!

Preview submission interface

Most journals require you to re-format your references, a truly life-crushing activity. As long as your references are clear, you can submit with any format you like!

Upload a wide-range of file-types as manuscript files, or supplemental materials.

Our submission system is designed to collect everything your editor and reviewers need to carry out their review. However, if you want to submit an additional message to your editor, you can.

Author your article using one of these useful manuscript write-up services, and submit for peer-review at PeerJ in a few clicks.

As the final step before submission, our system generates the PDF that your academic editor and reviewers use for their review. You can check it over, make any tweaks as needed, and regenerate, as many times as you need before you finally submit.

This helps you ensure that your editor and reviewers have the best possible version of your manuscript to review, although they will still have access to all your source files.

Our system guides everyone involved in your article's peer-review to take the right actions, at the right times, with as much automated support as possible.

This helps your reviewers focus on crafting in-depth, constructive reviews, and submitting them quickly. We built PeerJ to be the journal you want to review for!

We prioritize keeping you informed of your article's progress, with regular updates and important milestone alerts. If there are any delays we let you know what's happening (instead of letting the tumbleweed roll by for months).

To reward and incentivise high-quality reviewers, we offer a review certificate and 10 PeerJ Tokens (one Token equals 10 USD).

You can choose to include your article on our Reviewer Match page, allowing potential reviewers to volunteer to review your article (instead of being invited directly by your editor). Of course your editor has the final word on who they recruit, but enabling this option does help.

You can submit a personal message to potential reviewers, helping them quickly understand the key points of your work, and why they should review. This has been shown to boost reviewer acceptance rates.

All reviews of published articles are made public. This includes manuscript files, peer review comments, author rebuttals and revised materials.

Peer reviewers are encouraged (but not required) to provide their names to the authors when submitting their peer review. If they agree to provide their name, then their personal profile page will reflect a public acknowledgment that they performed a review (even if the article is rejected). If the article is accepted, then reviewers who provided their name will be associated with the article itself.

Why? Open reviewing is a powerful tool to help reduce reviewer bias, difficulties in blinding authors/reviewers, opaqueness or subjectiveness of reviews, invitation for undue criticism, and low review quality.

Note: For submissions created before 12 February 2023, authors were able to opt-opt of publishing their peer review history.

Publishing at PeerJ costs you less than at PLOS ($1,931+) and Scientific Reports ($2,390).

PeerJ's Article Processing Charge (APC) is $1,595.

You can also purchase a PeerJ individual membership (with a one-off payment) allowing you to publish every year for life.

Individual memberships start at $499 for a Basic plan, allowing you to publish 1 article a year.

Publish 2 articles per year with a $599 Enhanced plan

Publish up to 5 publications per year with a $699 Premium plan.

And yes, we know this sounds too good to be true!

You can either pay for publication via a standard APC, or via individual author memberships.

PeerJ memberships offer lifetime publishing for a one-off cost. Read more about PeerJ individual memberships.

If your institution has a prepaid plan with us, this may cover your publication payment. See if your instution has a plan with us.

Regardless of country, there's a method available to pay for article processing fees. We're also adding new local payment methods to make paying easier.

Our clean and easy-to-read article design is consistently mentioned by our authors, with many citing this as an important reason for choosing to publish with us.

Unlike most Open Access journals, we include an author proof-reading stage where you and your co-authors can check through your final PDF for any final tweaks or errors, before it's published.

You can imagine how frustrating it must be to finally have your article published, only to find a typo or other error and not being able to fix it!

We aim to publish as quickly as possible, with a median accept to publication time of 28 days. PeerJ publishes 5 days a week, so your article will published when it's ready, with no unnecessary delay.

Use our infographic service to produce a visual abstract of your article. An engaging way to help share your article on social media, and at conferences.

Use our video abstract service to record an interview explaining your work, combined with images and content from you article. A great way to communicate your research in your own words.

We can help you write a press release, and distribute it to our network of press contacts. This helps to maximise the coverage of your article in the media on publication day.

Your article is published on its own webpage, as well as being downloadable as a PDF. Our article webpages are easy-to-navigate, good looking, and fully optimized to be indexed in the major search engines.

We help you share and engage readers in your research, we provide an interactive impact task list that covers the key actions you can take e.g. sharing on Twitter, or writing a blog post etc.

Readers can ask questions and leave comments on your article, right down to the paragraph level, allowing you to engage in further conversations about your work.

You can view key impact metrics (e.g. citations, views, downloads, shares), as well as weblink coverage of your article in the media, blogs etc.

When your article receives its 100th visitor or receives its first citation, we'll send you a quick email to let you know. You will be alerted of key milestone view and citation counts for many months after publication.

Every published author is given the opportunity to complete a short feedback survey on their publishing experience. The whole PeerJ team are forwarded your feedback.