UC Berkeley joins trial of 3 Year Fixed Term PeerJ Memberships to support OA publishing

We are excited to announce that University of California, Berkeley is taking part in our trial of 3 Year Fixed Term PeerJ Memberships, joining University of Ottawa.

UC Berkeley have been long-term supporters of PeerJ, becoming one of the first universities to create a PeerJ institutional account back in 2013. Discussions with the team at Berkeley were instrumental in developing this new approach to PeerJ Memberships.

“Berkeley is not only one of the leading research and teaching universities in the world, and a leading proponent of Open Access, but they are also closely associated with nurturing innovation. We were delighted to develop this innovative approach to institutionally-funded PeerJ Memberships in collaboration with Berkeley and look forward to more Berkeley authors publishing in the PeerJ journal portfolio” said Nathaniel Gore, Director of Communities at PeerJ.

“UC Berkeley authors are sharing their research with the world through a variety of Open Access publishing programs, and the Library is happy to support PeerJ’s institutional membership model. With institutional memberships, the Library is able to cover authors’ membership fees so that there are no charges to UC Berkeley scholars for articles they publish with PeerJ” said Tim Vollmer, Scholarly Communication & Copyright Librarian, University of California, Berkeley.

Under the agreement, the UC Berkeley Library will cover the Three-Year Memberships in their entirety, which means that there will be no out-of-pocket fees for UC Berkeley authors to publish in PeerJ journals. The memberships are valid from the date of an author’s first publication and for a further 36 months, during which they can publish up to two further articles at any point during that time frame. This provides authors with more flexibility as to when they publish during their membership term, and averages out to a per-author cost of just under $80/article being borne by the Library.

For a publication to be funded via memberships, all co-authors on a paper must have a valid PeerJ membership. In the case of UC Berkeley, all non-affiliated authors need to obtain their own memberships as per PeerJ’s prevailing model and pricing. Any UC Berkeley authors who already hold lifetime memberships are unaffected by this new agreement; their lifetime memberships remain valid and allow them to publish one PeerJ article every year at no additional cost.

PeerJ will be announcing more agreements as part of a multi-year trial based on the Institutional Fixed Term Membership model in the coming weeks. If you would like your institution to be considered for the trial, please contact PeerJ.