PeerJ is a year old tomorrow!
June 11, 2013
Here’s a thing … Looks like the first ever mention of PeerJ on this blog was a year and nine days ago. All we said in that first post was “… the proliferation of other publishing experiments such as F1000 Research and PeerJ …” with no further comment.
That was just before the formal launch of PeerJ, which was on 12 June. A little more than two months later, Matt bought all-you-can-eat membership so he’d never have to think about it again. Three months on and we were enjoying the reference-formatting instructions (yes, really!) A few days after that — on 3rd December, the day it opened to submissions — we sent in what became our neck anatomy paper. They turned it around quickly enough to be in the first batch of articles on 12 February this year, for an impressive submission-to-publication time of two months and some silver.
Since then it’s cropped up all the time on SV-POW! — and for all the obvious reasons. Matt and I both see it as a game-changer, eating academic journals from “below”, and preprint servers and scholarly blogs from “above”. It’s certainly had an eventful year!
We wish it all the best in its second year. And its third, fourth and fifth years, and all the ones after that.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
June 11, 2013 at 11:06 pm
Many thanks Mike – a year already, it’s gone fast!
June 12, 2013 at 6:30 am
I hope PeerJ is well on its way to an ISI listing – so that the one hurdle keeping me from sending my stuff their way is removed.
June 12, 2013 at 8:55 am
Well, PeerJ is registered for ISSNs, DOIs and EZIDs, a member of CLOCKSS, indexed in Scopus, archived in PubMed Central (and indexed in PubMed), a full member of COPE and of OASPA, indexed in the DOAJ and partnered with BioSharing.
I suppose ISI listing might be one more hoop they need to jump through. There certainly are lot of these memberships and partnerships to be established for a journal to be fully recognised.
June 12, 2013 at 9:30 am
Yes, a hoop – but Leibniz measures us only by ISI-listing, and ideally we should publish only in top-quartile ISI-listed journals.
I could publish in PeerJ now, and hope that their listing will be made retroactive in three years time, but than I’d create double the work for me and the people writing the yearly reports.
Stupid?
Stoopid!
June 12, 2013 at 3:42 pm
Thanks Heinrich, and certainly we understand the unnecessary constraints that some academics are placed under when choosing where to publish. The good news is that we are in process for an ISI listing, and when we are selected then the listing is indeed applied retroactively.
Meanwhile, you can provide people with a lot more information about your publication by presenting them with the alt-metrics it accrues, which include actual citations, usage, referrals, tweets etc (as opposed to a simple indication of whether or not the journal it was published in also published some good papers a few years ago…)
June 12, 2013 at 3:47 pm
Oh how I wish all that IF nonsense would go away. Interestingly, the alternative (actual citations), which has issues of itself, often does not work well with Big Publishing (they miss a lot of citations) – I wonder if there is a business interest acting.