Note, there is no requirement to become a member, as you can publish with just paying for one "APC" (Article Processing Charge) per article. Additional fees may be required for very long manuscripts.

Pricing for Lifetime Memberships is (from October 1, 2016):

• Basic: $399
• Enhanced: $449
• Premium: $499

Memberships allow for one, two, or five peer-reviewed publications per 12-month period respectively, counting from your last publication to your next first-decision. All authors of a paper require a membership or a single APC charge must be paid instead.

APC pricing

For the peer-reviewed journal the publication fee or APC charge is USD $1,095 for PeerJ and USD $895 for PeerJ Computer Science. The price is the same regardless of the number of authors.

PeerJ Preprints is free of charge.

You may pay at any time after submission, up to the point of a final Accept decision. When a submission is accepted, payment is due before we can proceed to production for typesetting, etc.

PeerJ started out with per author Memberships. However, some organizations do not allow personal memberships for reimbursement.

Another reason is that our mission is to make high quality Open Access and peer-reviewed publishing as affordable as possible. Some articles may have a lot of authors, and so the APC fixed price would be the cheaper option.

Finally, for some the fixed per article "APC" is easier to explain to co-authors or funding agencies.

Not at the moment. You can still pay the "APC" per article charge if that is the cheaper option for you versus new memberships for co-authors.

APC - no requirements

Any reviewing requirements are only for memberships, and do not apply when paying for the one-off Article Pricing Charge (APC).

Memberships - annual reviewing commitment (see definition of review below)

We aim to make PeerJ a community, and no one is forced to provide a review if they choose not to do so. To help the community though, we are incentivizing participation by inviting those with paid memberships to submit a review at least once per year.

If you choose not to perform at least one review every 12 months, then at our discretion your membership could lapse and you will need to pay $99 to reactivate your plan the next time you want to publish with PeerJ. We think this give-and-take is fair to the community as it incentivizes participation in the ongoing task of peer review and will collectively reduce everyone's burden.

Review definition

• A 'review' can be an informal comment, question, or answer to an article in PeerJ, PeerJ Computer Science, or PeerJ Preprints.
• Or a formally requested peer review of a paper submitted to PeerJ or PeerJ Computer Science. Formal peer reviews will come as an invitation from an Academic Editor and only qualified researchers are asked to peer review.

Yes. You can pay for yourself, a few, or all of your co-authors in a single payment. Once you have submitted your manuscript you will see the payment options at the bottom of your manuscript dashboard.

The second option is to pay for the article, rather than individual memberships. Look for the "APC" or article pricing after submitting.

Becoming a PeerJ member is not a requirement, the single article publication fee or "APC" can be paid instead (one price regardless of author number).

You can upgrade at any time or choose the per article APC route.

Hopefully you'll be publishing in the future with PeerJ and not have to worry! And of course you are at liberty to submit new manuscripts to us, so please try again with a new submission. In addition, your paid plan still gives you plenty of rights to make use of PeerJ Preprints. However, we don't want you to feel cheated – upon request, you can get a refund within 60 days of purchasing a Membership (if you have already published with PeerJ then you are no longer eligible for a refund). If you pre-paid for an APC and your article is rejected or withdrawn before Acceptance, then you can receive a 100% refund on your APC payment.

PeerJ is an established publisher with a transparent process and we wouldn’t last long if we treated our authors poorly. Secondly all acceptance decisions will be made by independent Academic Editors who will make decisions solely on the science (and we will allow Appeals if you feel a bad decision has been made). And finally, editorial decisions will have nothing to do with the status of your publishing plan (free or paid).

Yes. Use the institutional publishing plan form to request information or ask us any questions.

We hope you agree that PeerJ's publication fees are already great value with the low APC and lifetime memberships! That said, we do recognize that some people are unable to pay this amount. Therefore, we offer a no questions asked fee waiver, on request, to anyone from countries that are classified by the World Bank as Low-income economies. The waiver simply applies to the publication in question, and is not a waiver for a full membership plan. We only allow one waiver per person per year.

In addition, any co-author who was an undergraduate at the time of the research may request a membership waiver (provided the paper has senior co-author(s) who have at least a Basic publishing plan, and provided the article passes peer review as normal). This is valid if paying through the Membership route rather than APC. Read more about this policy.

Don’t forget that papers typically have more than one author, authors tend to publish in more than one venue over time, and some will publish fewer papers than others. In addition, our cost structure is lower than more traditional publishing companies (which might have legacy systems to deal with, or be aiming to make an excessive profit). When you combine those facts, the finances do work out.

Yes. So for example when you sign up with PeerJ you can use a personal email address (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo), but when confirming your author details in a submission you can choose your institutional email address (corresponding authors emails are published with the manuscript). Since PeerJ publishing plans last a lifetime, this is helpful if you change institutions and no longer have access to the old institutional email (presumably you keep your personal email, Gmail, Yahoo, etc).

To change your PeerJ account email visit https://peerj.com/settings/account/ after logging in. When you confirm your author details on any submitted manuscript use the link that we email out to you to change the manuscript email.