Introductory Open Access APC option at PeerJ

Update: For the latest prices visit the pricing page

We’re pleased to announce that from today, researchers will have the option to pay an introductory (U.S.) $695 per article fee (APC) to publish in PeerJ, the award winning peer-reviewed Open Access journal in biology, medicine, and the life sciences. This option will also be available to the new PeerJ Computer Science journal. This represents one of the lowest APCs amongst similar classes of Open Access journals in academia.

Notice that we said “the option of an APC.” That’s because researchers still have the choice of purchasing one of our low cost Membership Plans. So, why the addition of a fixed APC charge? We have three reasons:

A surprising number of government and institutional researchers are prohibited from holding multi-year or personal memberships (or at least obtaining reimbursement for them). This means researchers are either paying out of pocket or forgo publishing in journals like PeerJ that only offer memberships. For these researchers, the only available option when it comes to paying for Open Access is often a per article fee, i.e. the APC.

Our Mission is to make publishing high quality Open Access as cost efficient as possible for researchers. With this low cost APC, papers that have a large number of authors do not need to worry about spending as much money – they’ll potentially be saving hundreds of dollars compared to the Membership price for each author.

Not everyone wants the Membership or to convince their co-authors to buy one. We recognize that a simple fixed fee that the APC represents is easier to explain to others or receive funding reimbursement.

We’ve priced the APC to be amongst the lowest in the industry for the class of service researchers are provided with at PeerJ. It is hundreds of dollars, even thousands, less than comparable multidisciplinary journals charging $2,000 – $5,000 for Open Access. We’re able to charge less because we’ve built our publishing platform in-house, and refine it continuously to create one of the most efficient workflows for publishing academic research. In short, it takes less time and human effort to publish the same quality of peer-reviewed research at PeerJ than elsewhere.

Despite the lower cost, we aim to have first decisions back quickly (currently a median time of ~24 days), a thorough yet courteous peer-review process, and a professionally designed modern PDF and HTML article. It is all indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus and more.

We want to thank the thousands of author members who have already published at PeerJ and we hope that you’ll continue to spread the word about the tremendous level of service you’ve experienced. Please tell your colleagues about the value of PeerJ to science, so that we can keep Open Access pricing as low as possible going forward. PeerJ can only continue with your support.