Our friends at PeerJ published their first articles on the birthday of Charles Darwin (Feb 12th) and today PeerJ has their first anniversary, so let’s wish Charlie a happy birthday. Exactly one year ago, we helped announce their launch with an interview of the co-founders Jason Hoyt and Peter Binfield.

Since that time, the demand for access to research has continued to grow, Mendeley and Frontiers have been acquired, the US and UK have mandated open access, and the volume of articles that are published in an openly accessible format has increased dramatically. PeerJ has contributed to this change by allowing authors to publish open access for $99 per author, just a fraction of the fees that similar open access publishers charge (in fact, cheaper than the page charges at many non-open access journals!), and also by opening PeerJ PrePrints and helping illuminate the hidden effort expended by editors and reviewers through their Academic Contribution metric.

PeerJ is raising the bar for what an academic publication should be (a bar already set fairly high by Elsevier’s Article of the Future), and we wish our colleagues at PeerJ many more successful years!