Bringing the article to life: PeerJ announces 3D printing of article images

As a publisher always looking to offer the best technologies to our users, and inspired by recent developments in sophisticated 3D print technologies, PeerJ is delighted to announce that from today we will be able to offer our authors 3D printing of article images. We feel this additional offering will really help authors to bring the article to life, and provide them with useful physical representations of imagery that can be used as teaching resources or within in a lab setting for example.

PeerJ authors will be able to tailor the physical output to their requirements by choosing both the size and colour of the 3D image. And, as with all PeerJ articles, we also want to ensure that our authors maintain full ownership of the 3D image, therefore we have developed our own 3D Data Rights Management system to prevent others from copying the 3D image (or even binning it!). There is no additional cost for this service, so authors still only pay $99 to publish their research for life.

3D printing of a 120 cell polytope.  Image credit: brewbooks  CC BY-SA 2.0

Further to this new development we also plan to offer delivery of the 3D outputs by our very own PeerJ drone, saving on any large postal costs and unnecessary delays in delivery times. Inspired by Amazon and Google’s recent tests with drone delivery we felt the time was right for PeerJ to experiment with this type of delivery mechanism too.

Delivery drone. Image credit: Don McCullough Drone and Moon CC BY 2.0

We hope our authors are as excited about these new developments as we are, and we look forward to waving off the first of many PeerJ drone deliveries.

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PS: Happy April Fools Day from all of us at PeerJ :)!