2022 was another busy year at PeerJ, and saw the start of our 10th Birthday Celebrations. Before we dive headlong into ‘23, we wanted to take a look back at our 10th year as an Open Access publisher
Contributor Rewards – the launch of PeerJ Tokens
At the start of the year, we launched PeerJ Tokens as part of our Contributor Rewards Program. By the end of the year, over 7,500 users had earned over 100,000 Tokens, and a number of articles’ publication had been funded by Tokens alone. Over 2,500 Reviewers have signed up to earn Tokens via our new Reviewer Database and we launched a new Reviewer Finder tool for our Editorial Board.
You can read more about the progress of the PeerJ Tokens program here.
Launching our first PeerJ Hub for the International Association of Biological Oceanography
In September we launched our first PeerJ Hub, for the International Association of Biological Oceanography (IABO). Co-developed with members of IABO, Hubs provide a sustainable Open Access solution for societies and research associations, with meaningful benefits for organizations and their members that make Open Access a more attainable and equitable option. Hubs are free to launch and provide an array of tools to support and grow a vibrant research community. We were delighted that the IABO Hub had received over 100 submissions by the end of the year.
If you would like to explore launching a Hub in ‘23, contact us today.
Our 10th Birthday Celebrations
To celebrate a decade of PeerJ, we launched a number of celebratory “birthday presents” to share our thanks and appreciation to our contributors. This included six free publishing promotions for specific subjects, which resulted in over 300 submissions eligible for a 100% APC waiver, numerous nominations for users favorite PeerJ paper (read the winning entries here) and a fantastic response to #OAadvocates to celebrate International Open Access Week 2022.
With the anniversary of our first published papers in February, we recommend keeping an eye on the blog and our socials.
Welcoming our first Editors-in-Chief
We were delighted to announce PeerJ’s first Editors-in-Chief across our chemistry and materials science journals:
- Jan Jensen, Professor at the University of Copenhagen was appointed as EiC for PeerJ Physical Chemistry.
- Professor Giovanna Bosica became EiC of PeerJ Organic Chemistry. Giovanna is Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Malta.
- Professor Debabrata Goswami, who is based at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, is our new EiC of PeerJ Analytical Chemistry.
- Junkuo Gao, Professor at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, was appointed to the role of EiC for PeerJ Materials Science.
We are incredibly excited to work with our new EiCs to develop their journals and communities.
We are still looking to appoint an Editor-in-Chief for PeerJ Inorganic Chemistry. If you are interested, please get in contact.
New Sections for PeerJ Computer Science
PeerJ Sections make our multidisciplinary journals more accessible, and provide homes for the communities that publish with us. Sections are community-led and exemplify a research community’s shared values, norms and interests. In response to the growth of PeerJ Computer Science we launched six new Sections in 2022, appointing 15 new Section Editors to lead them.
You can read about the new Sections and meet the Section Editors here.
Calls for Papers for PeerJ Special Issues
Working closely with 47 members of our Editorial Boards, we launched 16 Calls for Papers on a wide range of emerging topics for PeerJ Special Issues in 2022. We also held our first Special Issue Symposium in December, with Editors and authors of the Software Citation, Indexing, and Discoverability Special Issue.
The PeerJ Awards program continues to grow
2022 was the biggest year so far for the PeerJ Awards program, with 64 Awards made at 29 conferences all over the world. You can read a round-up of all the winners in a recent blog, and if you’d like to present a PeerJ Award at a conference in ’23 or ’24 then please get in touch.
There’s more…
We extended our partnership with Peer Community In to become peer-friendly journals to all PCIs; we welcomed new institutional partners to our Three Year Fixed Term Membership program; awarded 1 Gold, 6 Silver and 10 Bronze new Contributor Awards; published our first Method Development Article, of which we welcome submissions across all five of our chemistry and materials science journals; worked with a number of other publishers to launch the Fully OA blog and at the end of the year found out that PeerJ Life & Environment been approved for indexing in MEDLINE.
Then there’s the small matter of publishing over 2,200 research articles, welcoming over 320 new Editors to our Boards, posted 125 blogs and a whole lot more.
Thank you from PeerJ
As a small team at PeerJ we are indebted to the huge, varied and generous community of contributors that make all of this possible – we’d like to say thank you, from the entire staff team, to the wider PeerJ Team.
More to see in ‘23
We’ve got plenty of exciting plans coming up this year, so stay tuned.