Computer Science FAQ

Having spoken at length with our Editorial and Advisory Board members we know that publishing in computer science is ripe for change. In order to fully address the changing needs of the computer science community we soon realised that we would need to create a dedicated space to do this.

The Computer Science community has different publication expectations, so by building a dedicated journal we are able to iterate based on the feedback from the community. For instance publication in Computer Science mostly happens at conferences, and journal publication in this field is often very slow and rarely open access. By offering a dedicated open access journal we can help to educate the community on the benefits of publishing this way. Also, we may even be able to operate at the intersection of conference and journal publishing by creatively adding elements to our platform that mirrors some of the publishing experience found at conferences.

We are already proud of the speed of publication we offer the biomedical community (currently a median of 22 days to a first decision), and we want PeerJ Computer Science to operate at similar speeds. However, the way we operate our editorial and peer-review criteria too may need to be different for this community. For instance theoretical papers are very much part of the output of the Computer Science community, and we also hope to be creative when it comes to integrating source code and utilizing it.

Computer Science is a field that has only minimal overlap with bio/medicine, so rather than pool the needs of each community together we wanted to address them in a more dedicated way. Our readers will still be able to search simultaneously across both journals, so it will be a seamless experience from that perspective.

So to use Computer Science terminology – we’re merely ‘forking’ off a new journal that will have it’s own traits and paths, but our core mission still remains the same.

The costs are the same as for the PeerJ (biomedical) journal. Authors pay an Article Processing charge of just $695, or purchase a lifetime Membership (as described here) which entitles them to publish freely thereafter (subject to certain annual volume limits, depending on the plan). Authors may submit for free, and purchase plans at any point, however all co-authors on an article need to have an appropriate plan in place by the time of publication. Publication in PeerJ Preprints (our un-peer reviewed preprint server) is entirely free.

Since launching PeerJ, we have received a lot of requests from the Computer Science community to expand into their areas. Publication in Computer Science mostly happens at conferences, and as a result it is often quite expensive; articles may be rejected based on perceived impact or prestige; and the resulting output is often not openly available to readers. In contrast, journal publication in this field is often very slow, and is also rarely open access. We believe that PeerJ Computer Science (combined with PeerJ Preprints) can address many of the unmet needs of this community, by providing a fresh, flexible, innovative, rapid, and fully open access publication venue.

Although we took extensive feedback on the list of subject areas, we appreciate that the list may need further refinement or expansion. As a result, now that the journal is publicly announced, we are taking feedback from the wider community as to what their needs are. At present, nothing is set in silicon, so if you have a specific subject area(s) you would like to see listed, please email us at editor@peerj.com. Bear in mind though that any such list is always a compromise and has to balance several needs (e.g. the list shouldn't be too long; it should work for authors but also for readers; it should use the most widely understood terminology etc) - therefore we may not be able to accommodate all requests.

Now the journal is publicly announced, we are taking feedback from the wider community as to what their needs are. At present, nothing is set in silicon, so if you have a specific requirement, or a type of article you want to see included, then please email us at editor@peerj.com.

That remains to be seen, however in our current PeerJ journal we get first decisions back to authors in a median of 22 days.

We will open for submissions on Feb 12th 2015, and we anticipate publishing our first articles in April 2015. Preprint submissions are open now.

You can find the latest author instructions right here, but we also try to make the submission experience as easy as possible within the workflow with intuitive and just-in-time prompts to guide you through your submission.

We are happy to accept LaTeX submissions (our production group has an ‘all-TeX’ workflow). At present, please feel free to use any appropriate document class. In the near future, we will provide suggested files to use, but in the meantime anything is acceptable.

We are already indexed in the dblp. Although we cannot make any guarantees, we expect to be indexed in the appropriate computer science indexing services including for example, CiteSeerX, Google Scholar, Scopus, ACM Digital Library, Microsoft Academic Search etc.