Show HN: Peer Review Beta – A universal preprint+ platform
I've been working on Peer Review for the past year. It's still in early beta (pre-0.1) but I'm looking for some early adopters to start putting it through its paces and help highlight areas I should focus on.
Peer Review is an idea I've had for years. You're probably well aware of the problems involved in academic, scientific, and scholarly publishing - HN certainly discusses them enough. Peer Review is my attempt to solve them (or a subset of them).
Peer Review combines features of Github and StackExchange to allow scholarly review to be crowd sourced to a trusted pool of peers. It does this by tying reputation to a hierarchical field tagging system. Reputation gained in children is also gained in the parents. Authors tag their papers with any fields they feel are relevant.
This means authors can tag their papers with fields higher up the hierarchy to cast a wider review net, or go lower down the hierarchy to cast a narrower one. It also enables cross-discipline review and collaboration very easily - authors simply tag their papers with the fields of both disciplines.
The review interface combines aspects of Github PRs and Google docs.
Review is split into two phases: pre-publish "review" focused on giving authors constructive critical feedback to help the improve their work and post-publish "refereeing" which looks more like traditional peer review and is the primary mechanism through which new authors gain reputation.
The whole site is built around the idea that scholars are working to collectively build the body of human knowledge and make it the best they can.
You can see the production site here: https://peer-review.io
You're welcome to explore the staging site and treat it as a sandbox, if you'd like: https://staging.peer-review.io
It's open source: https://github.com/danielbingham/peerreview
I'm doing all the development in the open as much as possible. If it gains traction, the plan is to form a non-profit around it and explore whether a web platform can be governed democratically as a multi-stakeholder cooperative and if we can solve some of the issues around large centralized platforms through that governance approach.