Frequent Questions

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.

Authors who choose to pay for a publishing plan at submission get the cheapest rates, however authors can choose to submit for 'free' and pay only once accepted - in that instance their publication rates are slightly higher.

Our base model is for you to get a publishing plan on or before submission. However, when you pay at the point of submission, then there is the risk that having taken your money, we still unfortunately reject your manuscript. Therefore, you might not want to take this risk. In addition, because this is a new business model, people are not necessarily used to paying on submission.

We want everyone to be comfortable with their PeerJ experience, therefore we also allow people to submit for free. However, in that instance they need to pay after final acceptance and before final publication.

If you pay for a publishing plan at time of submission then you get the cheapest rates available (for example, $199 for the Basic plan), but if you choose to submit for free and pay only upon acceptance then you will pay an additional premium of $50.

Although every author of a paper must have a PeerJ publishing plan, we are not trying to penalize people like you. If your manuscript has more than 12 authors then only 12 authors need to have a paid publishing plan; all others only need a free publishing plan. For example, if your paper has 15 authors, then 3 do not need to pay for a publishing plan (they simply need to take the Free publishing plan, effectively just get a user account with PeerJ). If those same 3 authors want to publish with PeerJ in the future, they may have to get a plan at that time if they publish with 12 or fewer authors on the same paper.

You can upgrade at any time or chose the per article APC route. The top publishing plan (Unlimited Plan) gives you unlimited publications in both PeerJ, PeerJ Computer Science, and PeerJ Preprints.

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 of 80% of whatever you paid. If you have already published with PeerJ then you are no longer eligible for a refund.

No payment is due until after the accept-decision, although there are discounts for Memberships if paid before. 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 $199 for life is already an incredibly good deal! 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 publishing 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 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). 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.

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 $1,300 per article. One way or another these costs come out of money that could be going to research.

The millions already saved by publishing with PeerJ is based on the average subscription-based article cost less the cost of authors having published in PeerJ. Divide that number by ~5.5 to get the savings over popular Open Access venues. And remember, this is for life, so subsequent publications from the same author continue to save even more.

Finally, PeerJ Preprints (research that hasn't been formally peer-reviewed) are free for authors if made public. The research savings would be even greater than that reported on the frontpage if preprints were included.