Newest PeerJ Institutional Arrangements – UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge

We are pleased to announce that UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, two world-class research institutions, have just entered into new Institutional Arrangements to provide PeerJ memberships to their faculty. This means that any faculty member from these institutions who chooses to publish in PeerJ will have their membership fee automatically paid for them, out of the library’s funds.

“UC Berkeley has a strong interest in exploring and supporting a variety of open access projects. The UCB Library believes that open access publishing moves science forward and increases impact. PeerJ’s model is novel and exciting, and the Library supports its research community by paying for the one-time cost of membership in PeerJ,” said UC Berkeley library.

The University of Cambridge, UK, which has also entered into an institutional arrangement with PeerJ, will be announcing the details to their faculty in due course. The University has said that it sees PeerJ as an innovative and promising approach which re-imagines publishing for an open access world, and that by providing these memberships via an institutional arrangement they hope to help encourage their faculty to explore new publishing models.

“Universities are concerned about how they can continue with expensive journal subscriptions,” said Jason Hoyt, co-founder & CEO of PeerJ. “They’re also recognizing the importance of making their research outputs openly available. With PeerJ they’re able to purchase hundreds of lifetime memberships to publish Open Access for the price of one year’s subscription of the average journal. It’s really a statement about where they expect the future to trend. With these central funds, institutions are able to make transitioning to a future of Open Access easier for their faculty who choose to go that route today.”

These two new institutions join others such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Duke, Newfoundland, Trinity and Arizona State who have already made funds available so that their faculty can take advantage of PeerJ memberships and experience the future of open access publishing.

Institutions can choose to purchase individual memberships for their authors in advance (and distribute them as they choose), or they can pre-pay for memberships which are then used by their faculty as and when they come to publish at PeerJ. Both options allow an institution to provide an Open Access option to a large number of their authors, in an extremely cost effective way. Further details are available in this earlier blog post

Any Institution, Library, Consortia, Society, Foundation or Funding Body interested in discussing one of these arrangements can contact PeerJ at info@peerj.com or via their website at https://peerj.com/pricing/institutions/