A service that is travelling along similar lines of what I’m interested in for open publishing has launched today. PeerJ is being pitched as a cross between PLoS ONE and arXiv and indeed the company was founded by former PLoS ONE and Mendeley folk. It’s an interesting model where authors signup with a pre-paid plan. $99 gets you unlimited public preprints and 1 peer reviewed paper per year. $169 adds unlimited private preprints and another paper per year. $259 ups you to unlimited publications. And its nice as you can chose to pay once your paper is accepted (see how it works) so an author isn’t just being fleeced. There also appear to be reasonable plans for large numbers of co-authors etc. They also require members to review once per year. Nice.

I’m still reading through all of the materials about it myself, and there’s a lot here to digest and meditate on. It still appears that review is not open – both before and after ‘publication’ – although you can publish the review-trail and previous versions along with the finished product if you’d like. But in general, this is pretty fantastic

Here are some links about the launch and useful additional reading. I’d love to know what folk out there think. Will you be using it? Time to put our money where our #openaccess mouths are? I’m thinking yes!