The push to open access to scientific publications has seen some remarkable successes this year. After publishers appeared to overreach by pushing to revoke the US government's existing open access policy, researchers started boycotting one of the bill's backers. A competing bill was introduced that would compel more government agencies to make their work available via open access, and a similar White House petition has received over 25,000 signatures. Even the editor-in-chief of Nature now considers open access an inevitability.

Publishers that offer open access options need to recoup their costs without subscription fees, however, and had researchers pay for their publications with charges that are generally over $1,000. Now, a new open access journal is being launched that aims to turn the finances on their head. Researchers will only have to pay a one-time fee of $259 to gain lifetime publishing privileges in the journal, which will focus on biology research. Ars talked to the publisher, Peter Binfeld, to find out how the new peer-reviewed, biology-focused PeerJ will work.

Binfeld believes that open access to research has reached an inflection point. "It feels like we've turned a hockey-stick corner of a disruption curve, and open access is now picking up, and I think everyone can see that," he said. Unfortunately, open access publishing, though free for readers, costs researchers a lot of money. PeerJ is a "great opportunity to experiment with a different business model, a different payment model."

Binfeld was formerly at the open access publisher Public Library of Science managing its PLoS One journal, which charges its authors $1,350 to publish—and it's one of the cheaper PLoS journals (fees go up to $2,900 at other PLoS journals). PNAS, a traditional journal, charges roughly the same amount to provide open access to one of its papers, and that's on top of the usual per-page and per-figure fees charged for the print version.

All of which makes PeerJ's pricing model nothing short of jaw-dropping. For a one-time $99 fee, anyone can publish a single paper a year for life (although the first dozen authors on the paper all have to sign up). $259 buys any author a lifetime membership, with the ability to publish as many papers as they choose. Bottom line: for only a fraction of the cost of a regular publication, researchers can publish as often as they want.

"It flips the model from payment-for-publication to a membership model," Binfeld said, "where someone gets a membership for life and gets free publications thereafter."

A new approach

How can this possibly work? Binfeld's answer suggests that he has run the numbers carefully. Part of the solution relies on the dynamics of authorship: not everyone will publish all of their papers in PeerJ, and some people will publish a couple of papers and then leave research. Most papers in biology have multiple authors, too, which will help drive membership.

PeerJ has also figured out how to cut costs. The journal will use customized software to mange the article submission and peer review process, and journal content will be stored on Amazon's S3 service and presented to users via software running on EC2. For long-term archiving, the publication will be placed at the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central archive. According to Binfield's partner, Jason Hoyt, they've got a couple of servers for internal use, but everything user-facing will run on Amazon's hardware.

"When you do all the math, the revenue works out," Binfeld said, "and the costs need to be kept as low as possible."

Other aspects that add to the costs of traditional journals, like news and commentary, will not make an appearance in PeerJ. The journal will follow PLoS one's model: research will be judged on the scientific validity of the experiments, and the journal won't focus on the probable impact or significance of the work. The plan is to ensure that review is completed within a month of the article's submission.

PeerJ's involvement can, at the authors' choice, also start well before a paper is submitted for review. The journal will run a preprint server where researchers can place drafts and works-in-progress—common practice in the physics community, but not yet popular among biologists. Binfeld says PeerJ hopes to make the practice more appealing by giving users fine-grained control over sharing, letting them limit who has access to papers prior to publication. Authors also get the chance to share the title and/or abstract, which Binfeld suggested can help authors claim precedence for being the first to report some results.

Although the pricing and open access are appealing, PeerJ's plan is really to build up a sense of community within the researchers who publish there. "By doing this," Binfeld said, "we will have a community of members, of peers, rather than a collection of one-off customers who publish a paper with us, and we charge them money, they leave, and we don't care about them, we don't see them again."PeerJ will try to leverage this sense of community—Binfeld referred to having "members in good standing" who were involved in peer review for the journal.

PeerJ also plans to do peer review a bit differently. Members won't get credit for any peer review they do anonymously, which is part of a plan to encourage an open peer review system. "We're trying to encourage open peer review, and that really has two aspects," Binfeld said. "You can openly provide your identity as a reviewer. The other end of open peer review is to provide the entire peer review history on the published paper, and we're going to encourage but not require both of them." (That history includes the reviewers' comments and any changes made in response to them.)

PeerJ is trying many new things at once, and it's not clear all of them will succeed. Still, the most radical change—the low price—is sure to attract some people who are willing to give it a try. The journal also has an excellent pedigree, with Binfeld's experience at PLoS paired with that of cofounder Jason Hoyt, who worked at community reference management site Mendeley. The team has also picked up the backing of open access aficionado Tim O'Reilly. So even if all their different endeavors don't pan out, the effort still has the potential to be disruptive.