Celebrating a year of publishing at PeerJ

Today we celebrate, not just Darwin Day, but also the one year anniversary of publishing PeerJ articles. We published our first peer-reviewed articles on Feb 12th, 2013 and PeerJ PrePrint articles followed in April 2013. Since that time we have published almost 500 articles across both publications (we should exceed the 500 mark this week).

We are extremely proud to have passed this milestone, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors, reviewers, editors, librarians and readers who have involved themselves with PeerJ and who have shown such an interest in changing the way publishing happens.

The PeerJ publication model is unique among academic publishers – with a single low-priced fee, authors purchase a lifetime Publication Plan which entitles them to publish their open access articles with us, for free thereafter. By successfully implementing this model, we have driven down the costs of publication in a high quality open access venue, and we intend to drive them even lower. And this low price has not come at the expense of quality or service: our authors consistently rank us at the highest level for speed and responsiveness; and our technical and editorial innovations have been recognized with major industry awards and outstanding reviews. And demonstrating our strong institutional support, we were pleased to announce yesterday that 20 Universities (including the likes of Stanford, UCL, Berkeley, Duke, Cambridge and UCL) are now funding PeerJ Publication Plans for their authors.

We believe that PeerJ is a publication venue fit for the needs of 21st Century authors and readers, and we know that many thousands of people already agree.

We are noting this first year of publications by releasing “PeerJ Picks . 2014“. PeerJ staff combed through the 500 articles published so far in both PeerJ and PeerJ PrePrints, and picked out 20 personal highlights, representing the scope and diversity of the articles we have published to date. Some of these articles have over 25,000 views; some already have a significant number of citations; some represent major new findings; some are important papers in open data and open science, and some are just plain fun! We encourage you to explore this Collection, as well as all other PeerJ and PeerJ PrePrints publications, and add your own picks to the comments below this blog post.

Finally, what kind of a birthday would it be without presents? Therefore, we are also running a T-Shirt Giveaway – find out how to get one of the coveted PeerJ shirts at this blog post.

Experience the PeerJ process for yourself, and take advantage of our free publication offer (when you also submit a preprint) through the last day of March.