«PeerJ Inc., a new Open Access academic publishing company, formally announced itself today. Founded by seasoned academic publishing and technology professionals from PLoS ONE and Mendeley, PeerJ will publish a broad based, rapid, peer-reviewed journal (‘PeerJ’) and an innovative preprint server (‘PeerJ PrePrints’). PeerJ will open for submissions in Summer 2012, and will publish its first articles in December 2012. […] Journal subscription fees made sense in a pre-Internet world, but now they just slow the progress of science. It’s time to change that. PeerJ has established a new model for open access publishing: instead of charging you each time you publish, we ask for a single one off payment, giving you the lifetime right to publish articles with us, and to make those articles freely available. Lifetime plans start at just $99.» Read more here.
PeerJ and PeerJ PrePrints are both focused on the Biological and Medical Sciences. And they are both English only. So, why not start the same for the Humanities and in a multilingual setting? Please post your comments and ideas.
Solche Journals gibt es im englischsprachigen Raum mittlerweile mehrere, heute hereingeflattert: http://www.ijhssnet.com/update/ – dieses arbeitet mit einer Publikationsgebühr von 200 USD. Bei aller Löblichkeit der Initiativen: diese Modelle führen zwar den peer review-Gedanken ad absurdum, gehen tut es dabei aber vor allem ums Geld. Ich befürchte, dies führt zu einem Erkaufen von Leistung in einem neuen Sinn. Ganz so förderlich für die Zunft finde ich es nicht.