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.

Memberships and APCs

Institutions can choose to cover APCs, memberships, or both. Each has their own advantages.

APC

The article processing charge, or APC, is $695 for both PeerJ and PeerJ Computer Science. Authors that can choose the APC do not need to worry about getting memberships for everyone on their manuscript. The corresponding author 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.

Membership

Our institutional plans offer minimum cost for maximum exposure. For less than the price of one year's access to a couple of subscription journals, you can purchase 100 author plans allowing your faculty to publish for free - for life. Plans start at $139 per author for lifetime publishing. All co-authors on a paper will also require an author plan.

Institutions only pay once an article is accepted at the post-acceptance rate. This ensures that your faculty are able to publish their article free from any concerns about additional fees, and it is easier for the library to administer knowing that they have paid for something which will definitely be published, and that this will be the only fee required.

The minimum spend to set this up is $5,000 which would cover Basic Publication Plans for as many as 36 of your faculty (i.e. 36 x $139 = $5,004). Once authors have a PeerJ Basic Publishing Plan they are then able to go on and publish with us for life at no additional cost. Learn more about the PeerJ pre-payment model.

Should your faculty require more than a Basic Publication Plan (which offers the ability to publish an article every year for life), then we can also arrange institutional plans with our Enhanced or Unlimited offerings.

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 22 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.
• Low cost lifetime publishing – pay once and authors publish their work for life.
• 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.