PeerJ announces new Open Access membership model amid Article Processing Charge debate

PeerJ has announced a new membership model that it says will “move Open Access beyond the Article Processing Charge” in “a step towards a goal of collective action to support globally equitable access".

Its new model for institutional partners – Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs) – aims to remove payment barriers to Open Access for authors, reduce the administration of Open Access payments, and guarantee value for partners. The University of Bath is its first partner in the new program, which will provide unlimited publishing for Bath’s faculty for a flat fee.

The news comes after more than 40 scientists, including professors from Oxford University, King’s College London and Cardiff University, resigned from the academic board of the brain-imaging research journal NeuroImage, published by Elsevier, over high publication charges.

Jason Hoyt, PeerJ founder and c.e.o, said: “When PeerJ launched we wanted to leave the APC behind, and now we consolidate those ambitions by launching Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs).

“A decade ago we did not believe that the use of APCs to fund Open Access was sustainable, and the inflation of those charges today shows they are also far from equitable. The introduction of AIMs is an important step as we move closer to our ultimate goal of collective action to support globally equitable OA where no author will have to pay an APC to publish.”

Catherine Borwick, scholarly communications librarian at The Library, University of Bath, commented: “The University of Bath is happy to continue our partnership with PeerJ as an early subscriber to this new simplified model of open access funding." Nathaniel Gore, PeerJ’s director of communities, added: “We are delighted to launch this new model with the University of Bath, who are one of our earliest institutional partners and have championed our alternatives to the APC since 2014. By removing payment barriers in authors’ decisions to publish OA, and simplifying the process for both faculty and library staff, we hope to see the University’s research community take advantage of unlimited publishing across our portfolio.”

PeerJ describes AIM as providing “unlimited, frictionless OA publishing for institutional partners and their faculty,” continuing: “simple to manage, easy to purchase and providing great cost saving opportunities, researchers will never have to worry about having to pay an APC, and librarians can say goodbye to the administrative overhead of dealing with payments on an article by article basis.

“AIMs pricing is tiered and based on an institution’s publishing history in PeerJ’s journal portfolio. When a partner’s renewal is calculated, if the equivalent APC cost would have been less than the membership fee, they can choose to carry over the difference towards their membership renewal, or contribute to PeerJ’s Global Publishing Fund, which supports authors without the means to publish OA. AIMs simplify OA and are an important step towards a non-APC future of globally equitable access to read and publish open science.” Institutions interested in AIMs are invited to contact PeerJ at business@peerj.com.