Thanks for this Alex. It is logical they would not see PeerJ Perception/Vision as a possibility, but obviously it is a pity for us. Not being able to set our own editorial standards would be a big loss, I think.

That said, the formats within PeerJ could be worth trying, particularly the 'Collections', which could indeed 'be a good way for the community to dip our toe into the waters at PeerJ', with a special issue.

I'm going to try and contact http://www.ubiquitypress.com/ to hold a similar information gathering discussion with them. Their costs are also very low, and they seem to offer a much more straightforward platform for creating a traditional journal, so I think it would be good to know more from them to compare.

Ubiquity would be a good choice too, I spoke with Brian Hole (their CEO) three years ago when Dan Simons and I were thinking of starting a registered replications journal before APS got on board with the idea.. I also joined the editorial board of Journal of Open Psychology Data that Jelte Wicherts started with them a few years ago http://openpsychologydata.metajnl.com/ ( http://openpsychologydata.metajnl.com/ ), although it hasn't caught on much. They use customised versions of Open Journal Systems to keep costs low. At the time they were expecting an annual contribution of 1,000 GBP, usually paid for by the society backing the journal. Then there's also the author fees, but they keep those very low I think.

They may not have the nice layout, submission system, preprints, optional open peer review workflow, and science-related ecosystem that PeerJ has created, but still a good option especially because our community would have total control of editorials, editorial policy, structure, and process.

Thanks for gathering valuable info, Alex. While it's disappointing that PeerJ aren't interested in a separate Perception journal, I'm not too surprised. We're just not a big enough field for them.

Collections and Subject Pages don’t assign their own ISSN nor citation. The citation for each article would be to PeerJ (the journal) or PeerJ PrePrints.

In terms of placating administration-led focus on journal impact factors this would probably be a good thing, no? Since impact factors are largely a measure of the size of a field, PeerJ vision articles would benefit from the huge size of the biology field and associated citation rates.

As for subject pages: I see that on "psychiatry and psychology" there are a number of "editors and advisors". How are these editors chosen?

Perhaps one way forward would be to create a Perception Science (or Vision Science) subject page at PeerJ with a team of editors our community elects. These editors could agree on an editorial standard for the subject page, and the review of all articles appearing under the subject page would be supervised by one of those editors (who would also solicit reviews). In that way we could set editorial standards we feel are appropriate for our community. Do you think this would be feasible, or do you think these articles would get lost?

Do you think there would be scope to consider different review systems (e.g., the eLife system I detailed on another page)?

Tom yes, I suspect the PeerJ impact factor will continue to be 2 or higher, whereas an entirely new journal would not have an impact factor for a few years - as we've said a major obstacle to attracting submissions.
About how the editors are chosen, I think it's ultimately by the publisher Pete, but probably there's a role for the advisers and academic editors, I'll ask Pete. We would want this new perception area's editors to have say-so in appointing new editors, wouldn't we?
About the editorial standards, my feeling from talking to PeerJ is that they are not inclined to modify their written evaluation standards (which I have pasted below), they apply to all fields and I doubt they would allow us to write a distinct set.
However, note that what counts as their "high technical standard" is somewhat subjective, and probably they'd encourage communication among the editors in an area about what precisely that means, and maybe we could give more explanation of what it means in our subject's editorial content.
Everyone should also note their stricture that "The data on which the conclusions are based must be provided or made available in an acceptable discipline-specific repository", quite different from all perception-specific journals of which I am currently aware.

• The investigation must have been conducted rigorously and to a high technical standard.
• Methods should be described with sufficient information to be reproducible by another investigator.
• The data should be robust, statistically sound, and controlled.
• The data on which the conclusions are based must be provided or made available in an acceptable discipline-specific repository.

For editorials, Pete wrote back to say they don't have any facility for that but are interested in developing it. An editor would write it and submit it as a preprint and then it would go on the subject page as highlighted editorial content.
They don't know what the process would be for deciding who gets to write the editorials, but seem open to discussing it.

Currently Academic Editors on PeerJ need to be at PI level normally with >=25 journal articles on their CV. Unfortunately seems that would exclude some of the people who are most enthusiastic about this initiative, but perhaps something could be arranged. So far there's been no formal editor-level decisionmaking or organisation at each subject, but we could propose something for handling our putative subject page and editorials.

I like the idea that the editorial group could have an additional document for field-specific notes defining "high technical standard". I think the main thing would be to convince the community that rigorous standards will be upheld, and that papers will be rejected from the journal (unlike the perception of e.g. Frontiers).

Further to the subject page: do you think the editorial group for that subject page would have control over what keywords / tags could be used by PeerJ articles? That is, could someone just tag their paper as "perception science" (or whatever the subject page gets called) without going through one of the community's approved editors? If editors don't have control over the tags, I'd be worried that sub-par research slips in by being reviewed by non-experts but tagged as "perception science".

As for the Academic Editor requirements: that's a personal bummer for me, but I think overall it's better for the new journal to focus on appointing a well known editorial team rather than stocking it full of unknown postdocs. Getting a couple of high profile figures on board would help to boost submissions (and the enthusiastic postdocs can submit the first articles!).

I'm strongly in favour of a balanced editorial team, with both established types and up-and-coming postdocs. One reason (not the only one, for sure) is that the latter group are, as Tom points out, enthusiastic. I think that this counts for rather a lot, if my experience at Perception is anything to go by. Furthermore, the whole drive for this idea has come predominantly from younger researchers. It doesn't feel right that they wouldn't have a big say in how things develop.

Tom I think one would tag their paper with "perception" upon submission and that should send it to one of the corresponding editors. That's really important to check though. Also note that while the subject page has an automatic feed of all such papers, there's also the featured content which could be hand-picked by the editors.

Even if we could not set separate editorial standards, I must say, I'm very happy with the criteria Alex lists. I'm also happy with the PI +>=25 paper criteria for editors. I think it's more important people respect the editorial process, than that younger enthusiasts get to be editors. Personally I'd be very happy to just have a journal I am actually happy submitting to - I don't particularly care about being an editor of it. The bigger problem for me is the 'chief editor(/s)' role, someone needs to make a subjective decision after the criteria have been meet, and that surely has to be an expert in the field, not administrators at PeerJ. But again, sounds like they might be up for discussing that if we set up a subject page.

I'm hoping to hear more opinions and also the outcomes of deeper dives into other possibilities like Ubiquity Press, but if people continue to really like the PeerJ idea, we should be thinking about moving toward a concrete proposal for dipping the community's toes in the waters of PeerJ, something like publishing abstracts there from ECVP or a symposium or satellite, e.g. of ECVP or VSS. Would be great to have something concrete for people at the ECVP forum to sign on and commit to. Maybe there should be a fleshed-out proposal both for a subject page and the less-commitment test the waters thing. I suppose such proposals should be worked out on a separate thread.

One thing we haven't detailed much is the pricing structure at PeerJ and its consequences. I believe that, absent an institutional membership(?), all authors of a paper need to be PeerJ members for a paper to be published, at a minimum of $99/per author https://peerj.com/pricing/. Once you've paid those $99, you can publish one paper per year for life (or unlimited papers, if you instead pay $199). You can see how this unusual scheme is designed to rapidly grow the number of PeerJ members. Once I become a member, my incentive is to get my colleagues to sign up because although it costs my colleagues money to buy in, it won't cost me anything to publish additional papers.

By the way, this part of the discussion forum is currently public - anyone can read it, in case you didn't realize :)