Celebrating two-years of publishing, and PeerJ Computer Science now open for submissions

Today is a big day for us. Not only does it mark two years since PeerJ began publishing articles in the life sciences and medicine, but our newly launched journal PeerJ Computer Science is now open for peer-review article submissions. Take a look at our short video celebrating all of our milestones over the last two years.

Since we began publishing on February 12th 2013 we have published 749 articles, and 1,000 PrePrints* across all of the life sciences and medicine, culminating in the work of over 4,000 happy authors. All articles published adhere to our original mission, which is to publish the world’s best research openly to the world at a minimal cost to authors.

Right from the outset we wanted to offer authors the opportunity to publish in a high quality journal, but at very minimal cost to them. We always felt that if the cost to sequence an entire human genome is nearing the magical $99 goal, then why shouldn’t we be able to publish an article for that as well? In other words, we don’t think that publishing research should cost more than actually doing the research in the 21st Century. We are honoured that over 4,000 authors agree with this sentiment too and have chosen to publish in PeerJ. We are excited to now be offering this opportunity to authors in computer science with the launch of PeerJ Computer Science. Right now, we are offering free publishing credit to anyone registering at PeerJ Computer Science (credits must be used by Aug 4th 2015).

After just two years PeerJ is making a global impact. In a recent Author Survey 100% of published authors said they would recommend PeerJ to a colleague. Articles and PrePrints in PeerJ have had over one million views and over 400,000 downloads. With recent articles being covered in world renowned media outlets such as Scientific American, National Geographic, Boston Globe, Newsweek, Huffington Post, New York Times, The Guardian, Nature and El Pais amongst many others. The discoverability of these articles is also helped by the global indexing services PeerJ is signed up to, including most recently the Web of Science which means that PeerJ is due to receive an early Impact Factor this year.

We are also currently working with over 130 world-class institutions by offering Institutional Publishing plans that enable the institution to offer free open access publishing for their faculty members. Notable institutions include Cambridge University, Duke University, Max Planck Society, Stanford University and UCLA amongst others.

We built PeerJ with the scientific community in mind, and it has been an exciting journey so far in shaping PeerJ to meet their expectations. Our innovative publishing platform and our high quality but low fee ethos is central to what we do, and always will be. We are delighted so many authors are continuing on this journey with us, and by opening up to the computer science community we hope to be able to bring about as much of a sea change as we have been able to do in the biomedical community.

Most importantly we want to show our gratitude to all of the individuals who have made PeerJ what it is today. It’s thanks to the dedication of our Authors, Reviewers and Editorial Board that we’re now celebrating two years of publishing. We would also like to thank everyone who has believed in PeerJ and given their time, energy and support. We look forward to many more years to come!

Note: *816 Unique preprints to which 20% of authors have added multiple versions totalling 1,020 PrePrints to date.