Institutional plans

If your institution is committed to providing open access publishing for your researchers, you’ll want to deliver the best way for your faculty to do just that.

We've explained PeerJ's pre-payment model on our blog and a current list of our institutional customers can be found on the right hand side of this page. We are fully compliant with all open access mandates, and our plans ensure there is no administrative burden placed on the library.

To briefly summarize how it works, Institutions deposit an amount of money with us and as their authors come to publish with us we recognize them based on their email address, and credit them with a publication plan from the deposited funds. In this way there is no administration for a library to worry about; your authors can easily and seamlessly make use of the funds; and the library gets detailed reporting on who has used the fund.

Benefits to the library in administering the PeerJ Institutional Plan:

1. Easy for the library to administer OA payments - there is no flow of individual invoices or approvals needed.
2. Your faculty don’t have to go through any kind of approval or application process - they can just go ahead and focus on getting their work published.
3. The deposit is a one off event - there is no expectation to commit to an ongoing spend, and the money remains in the account until it is all used up.

Article Processing Charge (APC)

For institutions, volume discounts are available on the article processing charge (APC) for all journals. Authors that can choose the APC do not need to worry about getting memberships for everyone on their manuscript. The submission admin is the only one who needs to request funding, which covers all charges for their manuscript. Institutions can choose to allow automatic verification if the author has an institutional email account to verify themselves, or funding requests can be manually approved via a dashboard on the PeerJ website.

As an award-winning publisher, PeerJ offers your faculty a 21st century publishing experience. We offer researchers at your institution:

• Fast publishing – median time of 25 days to first decision for peer-review articles.
• Global visibility – open access CC BY licensing - authors keep full ownership of their copyright.
• Indexing and Impact – indexed widely and PeerJ received its first partial Impact Factor in June 2015.
• Author satisfaction – 100% of our authors would recommend us to a colleague.

See the full list of benefits of publishing with PeerJ.

Once a signed agreement and payment has been received there is very little additional administration for the library to do.

Institutions who sign up receive regular reporting; a public page on our site showcasing what was bought and how their faculty can use it; and marketing support. The institution gets ‘administrator level’ access to advanced analytics tools which are continually enhanced; and they get personal support.

Also, we can work with you over the lifetime of the institutional plan on any additional support you require, so we can be sure we are tailoring it to your needs.

Many estimates put the average cost of an article in a subscription-based journal at $5,333 ($US). And the most popular Open Access journals still charge more than $1,400 per article. One way or another these costs come out of money that could be going to research.

Finally, PeerJ Preprints (research that hasn't been formally peer-reviewed) are free for authors if made public. So, the research savings would be even greater if preprints were included in these numbers.