Academic publisher SAGE and PeerJ Inc., publisher of the Open Access journal PeerJ and pre-print server PeerJ PrePrints, have announced that SAGE has led a new investment as part of a second round of funding for PeerJ. With the investment, SAGE joins follow-on investments from OATV, O’Reilly Media and Jason Hoyt co-founder of PeerJ. David McCune, non-Executive Director of SAGE will now sit on the PeerJ Board of Directors alongside Tim O'Reilly, CEO and founder of O'Reilly Media, and PeerJ's two co-founders, CEO Jason Hoyt and Publisher Peter Binfield. With these additional investments, PeerJ still maintains its position as an independent company.
PeerJ uses an innovative business model whereby authors pay a modest, one-time fee for a lifetime publishing plan, giving them the ability to publish their articles openly at no cost to readers. PeerJ and PeerJ PrePrints primarily serve the biological and medical sciences. PeerJ was founded in 2012 by Binfield and Hoyt with initial startup investment from OATV and O’Reilly Media.
SAGE's investment reflects its commitment to exploring innovative publishing models. SAGE was an early advocate for open access publishing, forming a partnership with Hindawi Publishing Corporation in 2007. SAGE was also a founding board member of OASPA in 2008 and has since launched a number of titles – including SAGE Open, the first broad spectrum open access title aimed specifically at the behavioural and social science communities, which recently published its 600th paper. SAGE plans to release more titles across both HSS and STM disciplines in the coming months, including the flagship 'Research & Politics' and 'Big Data & Society.'
