PeerJ, a prestigious academic journal, recently announced the integration of Bitcoin payments for APC and memberships fees. PeerJ publishes academic works through open access licensing, and has published 1924 peer-reviewed articles to date.

According to the blog post announcing the news, PeerJ brands itself as the first academic journal to start accepting the innovative digital currency:

“As far as PeerJ is aware, we’re the first academic publisher to start accepting Bitcoin for its peer-reviewed Open Access charges in the life sciences, biology, medicine, and computer science.”

Since launching in 2012 with a $1 million capital infusion from O’Reilly media – a venture capital firm headed by famous investor Tim O’Reilly, who is now on the PeerJ Board of Directors – PeerJ has gathered editors from prestigious education institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, and has logged “1,138K downloads of 4,308 articles and reprints”.

In July of 2014, the journal received

PeerJ’s computer science division sports in excess of 300 editors, and is in partnership with USENIX, the advanced computing systems association. Publishers at PeerJ are only required to pay a one-time access fee and readers are given free unfettered access to all publications on the site.

The release states:

“And remember that all articles at PeerJ and PeerJ Computer Science are Open Access, meaning free to read and download, forever. “

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