I am very excited to announce that Sympoze is transforming into an even better service for philosophers. We’re going to use it to crowd-source academic peer-review and create a high-quality open-access philosophy journal and high-quality open-access philosophy text books.
I started Sympoze a couple of years ago as a social bookmarking site for philosophers (something like Digg or Reddit for academia). After consultation with several philosophy/academic friends, it became clear that a better use for the social-bookmarking tools I was using would be to turn it into a peer-review service for scholarly publications.
- Reduce referee burden
- Reduce review time
- Speed up finding qualified referees
- Eliminate the bad luck of being assigned to a biased or over-worked referee
- Diversify feedback
- Yield decisions that are better representative of the opinions of the field
It will do all of this without sacrificing any of the benefits of the traditional process. I explain how Sympoze yields these benefits in more detail here. I outline how the process works here, and I address FAQs here. Check out the site if you have a chance and let me know if you have any questions, comments, feedback, or suggestions.
Very cool project! Looking forward to its development. I just signed up as a referee. I don’t have the PhD yet (or the email address at my next gig yet), but I’ll have it in a month!