Free and open non-profit publishing and peer review platform

Open and replicable science
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Hi all,

I am currently building something that might interest some of you. The project is called PEvO (Publish and Evaluate Openly), and it allows scientists to publish papers or import existing preprints by DOI, give and receive structured peer review, and build a reputation computed from these contributions.

The barrier to entry is intentionally low. Right now there are 3 options for accreditation: an institutional email address, 3 external publications visible on the ORCID profile, or 3 already accredited users vouching for you.

For the technical part: it uses a public, decentralized network (I actively avoid the term blockchain, because that usually triggers connections to token scams and such - it is the backend that allows timestamping, ownership and permanent decentralized storage, but there is no financial angle at all) to store content, discussions and ratings. Bigger files can be attached and stored on IPFS, with a tool that allows anyone to help hosting selected datasets.

The code is AGPL licensed, so anyone can fork it. The reputation algorithm is designed so that anyone can run it with changed parameters and adapt it. So far, it is fully self funded by me, and there are no plans to make money from this. To be able to issue DOIs, it will require a legal umbrella, and I’m eyeing a non-profit association in Portugal, but that’s something to approach in the future.

For now, I am looking to build a community around the idea, and get the ball rolling. I launched an open beta a few weeks ago, and am targeting a soft-launch (without connection of the publications to the wider ecosystem - Google Scholar, DOIs etc - but fully functional reviews and evaluations) in September.

I would be happy to get feedback from this community, and maybe even find some people who want to get actively involved. Don’t hold back with criticism either, I’m tired of hearing that it’s a great idea and then being ghosted.

You can find the beta at https://beta.pevo.science - there’s an about and a FAQ page which can help understand it better, and a blog with the roadmap for the launch.

Hit me with your thoughts! Michael

2 Likes
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This looks amazing, and I definitely want to help! As for feedback, the first thing that comes to mind is all the noise in landscape. There are so many options out there, and over the years I have joined so many open science and open access platforms, but in the end, they are not very robust (I’m looking at you, F1000). What problem is PEVO solving? The second thing is gatekeeping. I tried to sign up through ORCiD but was rejected because my works don’t fit neatly into the cross-reference database. As a practitioner, most of my work is invisible to gatekeepers. So the second question is: who is the target user for this service?