The Unjournal is a grant-funded nonprofit (over $600k in funding from Survival and Flourishing Fund and others). We commission experts to publicly evaluate and rate research. We aim to make impactful research more rigorous, make academic work more useful, support open science, open access, and transparency, and improve peer-review, helping align research incentives with truth-seeking and social value.
We focus on research in economics, policy, and other quantitative social science with potential for global impact.
Peer review is great, but academic publication processes are wasteful, slow, rent-extracting, encourage rent-seeking, and discourage innovation.
Academic publishers extract rents and discourage progress. But there is a coordination problem in ‘escaping’ this. Funders like Open Philanthropy and EA-affiliated researchers are not stuck - we can facilitate an exit.
The traditional binary ‘publish or reject’ system wastes resources (wasted effort and gamesmanship) and adds unnecessary risk. The Unjournal offers an alternative: a system of credible evaluations, ratings, and published reviews (linked to an open research archive). This enables more readable, reliable, and replicable research formats, such as dynamic documents; and allows research projects to continue to improve without “paper bloat”.
Global priorities and EA research organizations are looking for ‘feedback and quality control’, dissemination, and external credibility. We gain substantial benefits from supporting, and working with The Unjournal, rather than (only) submitting our work to traditional journals. We also put direct value on results of open science and open access, and the strong impact we have in supporting this.