I'm building Peer Review. It's a scientific and academic publishing repository, with the potential to replace the entire academic journal system with a single web platform that is diamond open access (free to access, free to publish), open source, and ultimately run by a non-profit which is governed and funded by the community of scholars who use it.

The Problem

Academic publishing is badly broken. It's privatized and monopolized, shutting out the average citizen (who is the decider of policy in a democracy) from the academic and scientific literature. It's reaching the point where even wealthy universities can barely afford the journals. The open access movement is trying to fix the access side of it, but in doing so, most open access journals are simply transferring the cost to the publishing side, which ultimately does not fix the problem. And it creates a whole new host of bad incentives.

To make matters worse, the proliferation of journals (over 10,000 of them) and the rise of pay to play journals means that the quality control of peer review has broken down. A dishonest researcher can simply take their rejected paper to a pay to play journal and have it published without refereeing. The vast number of journals means it's impossible for the average person to track which journals are reputable and which are not - even academics are struggling with it. The end result is that academic peer review has stopped filtering out bad science. It's all getting published and the public can't tell the difference.

The Fix (Potentially)

Peer Review is a software platform that I believe can fix this. It is a single website that allows any academic to post a draft of their paper, tagging it with the relevant fields, and get pre-publish editorial reviews from peers in their field (and only from peers in their field). It uses a post-publish refereeing system for quality control - preserving the quality signal for the public when reading the literature. Reviews are self-selected, with a reputation system controlling who can offer a pre-publish review and do post-publish refereeing on each paper. Reputation is gained by doing good work - publishing good papers and offering good reviews - and it's linked to the tagging system, meaning reputation is only gained in the relevant fields.

This system allows scholars to self-organize the work of review and publishing, meaning it can replace the journals entirely. It puts full control of the process in the hands of scholars.

Right now the universities are each paying tens of millions of dollars to the major journal publishers for access to the literature. The infrastructure costs for a website capable of replacing all of that would be on the order of a few million dollars, and the team of engineers to support it a few tens of millions.

This platform could potentially be funded by the community of scholars who use it - and eventually by the institutions that would depend on it - while saving the academic community billions of dollars in publishing costs. All while making the academic literature freely available to the world, and helping the world see and understand how the scientific quality control process works.

Why We Need Sponsorship Funding

Right now, I am working on Peer Review full time, with the help of a handful of very part time volunteers. I've got about 6 months of runway before my savings run out, at which point I'll have to stop working on it full time if I haven't secured funding. Peer Review is approaching a feature complete alpha - so all of my time is spent developing it. Once we reach open beta, I'll shift to applying to grants and approaching the institutions for funding. But in the mean time, every dollar donated through sponsors extends the runway.

If we can raise enough money to pay my bills (mortgage, health insurance, etc), feed my family, and cover the infrastructure costs of Peer Review (about $7000 / month + infrastructure costs), I'll commit to working on it full time indefinitely and form the 501(c)3 non-profit organization to run it.

Who are you?

My name is Daniel Bingham. I grew up in an academic family, but went into software engineering. I've been coding since I was 12 and developing professionally for 13 years. My last role was Director of DevOps for Ceros (a medium sized software company of 300-400 people), where I ran the department which built and managed the cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines. When I'm not coding or running software teams, I'm engaged in activism around sustainability, an equitable economy, and democracy. I've served as president of the board of non-profit cooperatives and on government task forces. I have a deep commitment to open, transparent democratic structures and a fair amount of experience creating and running them.