The new open access journal, PeerJ, has been accepting publications since December 2012. So far 46 articles have been published. The ideas behind the journal are brilliant; low costs for the authors, fast peer-review, and they do not evaluate the impact of the articles, only quality. Up till now articles have been published in batches, three so far, and a rough estimate tells us that about 10% of the submitted articles have been published. According to the PeerJ website, they expect an acceptance rate of about 70% once the journal is fully up and running. There seems however to be a delay about 20 days from acceptance till the final article is published, which might be fixed when PeerJ Preprints is up and running (Figure 1). I believe most authors want their paper out once it has been accepted.
Another issue is the visibility of the articles. So far, it seems like very few people are aware of the journal, and probably not many has made the habit to visit the journal. The median number of unique views per day per article is currently 9.85, way too low in my opinion, but I guess the journal needs one or two years before such numbers make sense. The most read article has however 589 views per day,while the first article fronted by PeerJ has 188 unique views per day so it is indeed possible to attract readers to single articles. Figure 2 is showing the density of article views per day for the 46 first article. Anyway, I welcome this journal and their thinking, and hope more people will embrace it.
Edit: It would be interesting to compare the start-up of PeerJ with Scientific Reports. It seems like they published about the same number of articles the first month, but unfortunately SREP does not not show the number of accesses for articles published in 2011.