Open access publisher PeerJ has announced the launch of PeerJ Computer Science, a cross-disciplinary open access journal publishing articles across all fields of computer science. The journal will start accepting preprints on February 3rd and peer-review articles on February 12th, which is also PeerJ's two-year anniversary of publishing in the biological and medical sciences.
From February 3rd interested authors can visit peerj.com/computer-science to find out more about the journal, and its almost 300 strong Editorial and Advisory Board (which includes a number of high profile computer scientists including Vint Cerf, Wendy Hall, David Patterson and Mary Shaw). PeerJ is offering free publication to all those who register their email at this page, and also to their colleagues simply by providing their email details.
The landscape for academic publishing within computer science is ripe for change. There are very few open access journals currently serving the computer science community, and authors in this field are mainly publishing their work either at academic conferences or in subscription journals. The traditional journal route can be very slow for authors in this field with lengthy review processes, which is one of the reasons why authors often find that disseminating their work at a conference is a much faster route to obtaining a decision. The current system for publishing in computer science is in need of some fresh innovation, and by opening up submissions for computer scientists PeerJ is aiming to bring a 21st century publishing platform to computer scientists.
PeerJ Computer Science will operate in the same way as PeerJ – articles will be published through CC BY licensing ensuring that the content is freely accessible to the world. The business model also remains the same with authors paying a low cost fee to publish their article, starting at $99 for lifetime publication. Although it remains to be seen how fast the new journal will be, PeerJ's life science and medicine authors currently receive a first decision in a median time of 22 days, which would help to address the need for quick turnaround times for computer scientists.
By publishing cross-disciplinary research across the full spectrum of computer science, PeerJ Computer Science hopes to engender more cross-fertilisation between fields and to become a hub for the computer science community as a whole to interact. PeerJ intends to work closely with the computer science community from the outset to help shape the journal as it grows.
