PeerJ is pleased to announce that two research institutions UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge have entered into new institutional arrangements to provide PeerJ memberships to their faculty. By doing so, any faculty member from these institutions who chooses to publish in PeerJ will have their membership fee automatically paid for them, out of the library's funds.
The University of Cambridge, UK, which has also entered into an institutional arrangement with PeerJ, will be announcing the details to their faculty in due course. The University has said that it sees PeerJ as an innovative and promising approach which re-imagines publishing for an open access world, and that by providing these memberships via an institutional arrangement they hope to help encourage their faculty to explore new publishing models.
These two new institutions join others such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Duke, Newfoundland, Trinity and Arizona State who have already made funds available so that their faculty can take advantage of PeerJ memberships and experience the future of open access publishing.
PeerJ emphasises research integrity; high ethical standards; constructive peer-review; exemplary production quality; and leading edge online functionality. The journal is indexed by PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Scopus and Google Scholar. There is an Editorial Board of over 800 world class researchers, and a 20-member Advisory Board which includes 5 Nobel Laureates. In addition, PeerJ members benefit from the ability to publish unlimited articles in PeerJ PrePrints.
Institutions can choose to purchase individual memberships for their authors in advance (and distribute them as they choose), or they can pre-pay for memberships which are then used by their faculty as and when they come to publish at PeerJ. Both options allow an institution to provide an Open Access option to a large number of their authors, in an extremely cost effective way.
