New Article: “PeerJ: An Open-Access Experiment” by Peter Binfield

Peter Binfield, Co-Founder/Publisher of PeerJ and a publishing industry veteran, has written an article about the new oa publication.
The article appears in the latest issue (November/December 2012; 47.6) of EDUCAUSE Review.
From the article.

Perhaps the most visible thing that we have done at PeerJ is to innovate around the dominant business model in use in the OA world. OA is a distribution model, not a business model (a fact that is often overlooked in the OA debate). With this in mind, although there are several ways to finance a “gold” OA publication, the business model that has seen the widest, most successful adoption is the one is which authors pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) per article published, with fees ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. It seemed to us that even at this early stage of OA development, there was very little in the way of viable experimentation with new or innovative business models—hence our development of a “membership model.”
Unlike the “traditional” APC business model, PeerJ provides authors with a lifetime membership that gives them the right to publish future articles without further charge. The basic membership fee is $99, which allows someone to publish one article a year; and $299 buys the rights to publish unlimited articles. The only “catch” is that all co-authors on a paper must be paying members in good standing. This model will provide a new and interesting alternative to the APC model, and if we can lead by example, then perhaps various other OA business models could be developed in this space.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: Scholarly Publishing: PeerJ Launches Open Access Journal and Preprint Server (Roundup) (June 12, 2012)
See Also: A June 2012 Presentation from the Other Co-Founder of PeerJ, Jason Hoyt

Filed under: Journal Articles, News, Open Access, Publishing, Roundup