PeerJ  to Charge Authors Maximum of US$299 for Lifetime-Unlimited Open-Access Publications and Submissions. (June 14, 2012)

PeerJ announced its launch this past Tuesday. Its Modus Operandi: authors to pay a one-off fee for a life's membership which guarantees them the right to publish, peer-reviewed research papers without further payment.

PeerJ's founders, Peter Binfield, until recently publisher of  PLoS ONE, and Jason Hoyt, who previously worked at the research-paper-sharing site Mendeley, claim to have developed cost-cutting mechanisms to allow their business model to succeed.

Dr Binfield told Nature's Richard Van Noorden "We are seeing a Cambrian explosion of experiments with new publishing models. It’s going to be an interesting period for the next few years." And he hopes PeerJ’s growth will resemble that of PLoS ONE, which rose from ~1,000 articles in its first full year (2007) to its current 2,000 per month: "PLoS ONE is publishing so many articles that it is stretching the boundaries of what is a journal — instead, it’s becoming a large, peer-reviewed repository of research articles. We’re setting ourselves up for exploring that future," but he emphasises that to be viable it won't need to scale up to that volume.

According to Mr Van Noorden: "PeerJ users pay $299 for unlimited open-access publications and submissions, or a smaller fee ($199 or $99) for a limited number per year. (All authors on multi-author papers must be members, although papers with 13 or more authors need only 12 paying members)... articles will be peer reviewed for scientific validity — but not for importance or impact [which] marks a distinction from selective open-access journals such as the forthcoming eLife, which plans to publish only high-impact work. To avoid running out of peer reviewers, every PeerJ member is required each year to review at least one paper or participate in post-publication peer review.