**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**
The Unjournal Awarded $565,000 Grant to Build a New Way to Evaluate Research
June 27, 2023 - The Survival and Flourishing Fund has awarded a $565,000 grant to The Unjournal, an initiative that seeks “to make rigorous research more impactful and impactful research more rigorous,” according to Dr. David Reinstein, founder and co-director.
The Unjournal aims to supplement and ultimately replace traditional academic publishing.
The Unjournal’s approach is simple:
- Identify and solicit publicly-shared social-science, economics, and policy research that addresses crucial global priorities such as extreme poverty, disease, and international conflict.
- Employ experts to assess the credibility and usefulness of the research, give clear feedback to the authors, and provide quantified ratings.
- Publish these evaluations on an open-access platform.
This is in stark contrast to the typical academic peer-review process, which is labor-intensive, slow, and opaque. Traditionally, researchers submit their papers to “prestigious journals” as a requirement for professional advancement. The journal editors nominate other professors to write extensive “referee reports” which the editors use to determine whether to accept or reject the paper. They often ask the authors to write detailed revision responses (that can be as long as the paper itself). Manuscripts may be strategically tweaked and submitted to one journal after another, rejection after rejection, over the course of years. Meanwhile, other researchers (and policymakers) see only which papers are published and where; there is no explanation for why a paper ended up in a particular publication, nor for what the reviewers valued and found credible. In addition, while authors and reviewers provide their content for free, the journals—often for-profit businesses—take in millions of dollars in fees charged to universities for subscriptions.
The Unjournal, on the other hand, will set aside over $100,000 of its grant to reward evaluators and authors for their strong work. Furthermore, The Unjournal will make all evaluations, ratings, and responses public, freely accessible, and linked to the open-access research. “We want researchers to focus on doing research, sharing it, getting it rated, and improving it … instead of playing the long and complicated game of ‘getting published in a top journal,’” says Reinstein.
The Unjournal, a not-for-profit project, plans to expand its scale and scope to cover 70 papers and projects over the next 18 months. According to Reinstein, “The Unjournal, along with related initiatives in other fields, should become the place policymakers, grant-makers, and researchers go to consider whether research is reliable and useful, and a serious option for researchers looking to get their work evaluated.” As part of this plan for growth, The Unjournal is expanding its management team, contracting with researchers and other staff, increasing its incentives and prizes for evaluators and authors, and building connections with a range of institutions in academia, open-science, and philanthropy. “This is a major opportunity. We can begin to replace an outdated journal-based model with a much more useful system of credible and transparent evaluation,” says Reinstein. "The Unjournal intends to be a platform that enables more rigorous, accessible, and relevant research, ultimately leading to better decisions, better policy, and better outcomes."
Further notes and contact information:
David Reinstein (PhD, Economics, UC Berkeley 2006) is an economist with experience in academia and applied research. See: DavidReinstein.org. The Unjournal’s Management Committee includes researchers with expertise in economics, psychology, and other social sciences and quantitative fields. Their Advisory Board includes professors, doctoral students, researchers, journalists, and practitioners from five continents.
The Unjournal is a project under the fiscal sponsorship of the Open Collective Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. For more information and updates, or to get involved, go to Unjournal.org, or contact theunjournal@gmail.com.