About a year ago a fair kerfuffle emerged as academic authors began to revolt openly against Elsevier, the biggest and probably greediest of the academic publishing dinosaurs.

As I and others noted back then academic publishing is a gigantic scam in which free labor (peer reviewing) is used to filter works submitted for free by people (researchers) who got other people (usually taxpayers, corporations or endowments) to pay for the research in the first place. All this free and paid-for-by-others stuff is then turned into extremely expensive dead trees by publishers like Elsevier who charge so much that even very rich institutions like Harvard are saying "enough" and refusing to pay more.

Around that time, Tim O'Reilly put his money behind people who included Peter Binfield, the managing editor of PLOS ONE with the goal of changing the game entirely. The result, known as PeerJ, has been hard at work and this week published its first articles, with a pricing model that - to use a much-abused term these days - is majorly disruptive.

For great details and background I urge you to read the comprehensive piece by Michael P. Taylor at TechDirt. Taylor has one of the first-published articles and he is clearly enthused about this project.

PeerJ promises to combine revolutionary low pricing levels (like, USD 99) with high-speed turn-around, addressing two of the worst problems in academic publishing. PLOS ONE has a great pricing model compared to traditional publishers, but PeerJ blows even PLOS ONE out of the water on pricing. Taylor also reports that PeerJ's user experience is first-class, something that ought to attract academics who are still leery of working with non-traditional publishers.

And yet... and yet, I cannot help re-asking the question that I think forms the heart of this problem: what about tenure? Is there any evidence that, five years on, non-traditional journal publications have the weight and impact that traditional journals do? Because Taylor's subhead is about "the moving-prestige-to-open-access dept" and last time I looked open access wasn't granting tenure, and when you submit a grant proposal to DARPA or NIH or your favorite funding source, they still require you to submit a publications list and they still care where you publish.

Yes, PeerJ is bringing revolutionary and much-needed pricing change. But until someone can show me the professors who got tenured publishing in PeerJ or PLOS ONE, there's still going to be a long distance between publication and prestige.