Dr. Peter Binfield has worked in the academic publishing world for almost 20 years. Since gaining a PhD in Optical Physics, he has held positions at Institute of Physics, Kluwer Academic, Springer, SAGE and most recently the Public Library of Science (PLoS). At PLoS he ran PLoS ONE, and developed it into the largest and most innovative journal in the world. He is a respected authority in the academic publishing and Open Access worlds and has made numerous presentations to industry and academia. He is currently a member of the International Advisory Committee of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE) as well as being on Board of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). He is passionate about academic publishing and believes that publishing needs to be in service to the academic community to best facilitate the rapid and broad dissemination of research findings.

PeerJ is a new open access publisher, co-founded by executives from Mendeley and PLOS ONE, which provides authors with high quality open access publication at dramatically lower prices than has previously been possible. PeerJ launched in June 2012 and has been publishing articles since February 2013. It has been named as one of the Top 10 “Educational Technology Innovators of 2013” by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and as the “Publishing Innovation of 2013” by the Association of Learned and Professional Scholarly Publishers. The company publishes PeerJ (a peer-reviewed journal indexed in PubMed, PMC, Scopus etc) and PeerJ PrePrints (a pre-print server akin to the arXiv). PeerJ has a large Editorial Board., including 5 Nobel Laureates, and publishes across the biological / life / health / medical sciecnes.