Journal Offers Flat Fee For 'All You Can Publish'

ananyo writes "In what publishing experts say is a radical experiment, a new open-access venture is asking its authors for only a one-off fee to secure a lifetime membership that will allow them to publish free, peer-reviewed research papers. The venture, called PeerJ, formally announced its launch on 12 June. The model represents a big departure for science publishing, which has traditionally been dominated by two basic business models: either subscribers pay for access, or authors pay for each publication — often thousands of dollars — with access being free."

Chicken/Egg

[Missing.Matter]

I still haven't seen a good solution to the catch 22 that a journal cannot gain a reputation without first being reputable. No one with any concern about their academic career will publish in a no-name, no-eyes journal. As it is, it's hard enough to get people to read and care about your work by publishing in top tier journals. How do you expect academics to justify to themselves that the work they've spent months to years on doesn't deserve a better venue for dissemination?

Re:My LiveJournal account was free.

[Anonymous Coward]

A journal is like a newspaper, and newspapers are featured in that old video game Paperboy.

In that game Paperboy was a guy operating a jackhammer, who looked like he was masturbating in the NES version.

Masturbating.

-- Ethanol-fueled

The Journal of American Ponzi Schemes

[HaeMaker]

If they don't get a constant source of new authors, they can not sustain the model...

Re:Chicken/Egg

[DrEasy]

What we need is for reputable researchers from reputable institutions to launch free open access journals, and have them managed and archived by their libraries, using digital library tools. In Artificial Intelligence, there's already the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) that has been free and available on-line since the beginning, and it has a good reputation.

The digital repository tools are mature now, we just need MIT, Stanford and others to decide to circumvent Elsevier and co and do it themselves. Then federate all the digital libraries across universities, and now you have additional redundancy and ease of access. It might even be cheaper for universities to run their own digital repositories instead of paying Elsevier and co outrageous fees. Or at least it gives them some leverage for fee negotiation.

Udacity and Coursera were launched by Stanford profs; not sure no-namers would have had the same success.