The Academia that
Science Deserves

Anonymous reviewers.

Paywalls.

Publish or perish.

Journal metrics.

Subscription fees.

Publication costs.

…

We can, and must do better…

Who we are

Open Scholar is a non-profit, community interest organisation founded by a group of active academics who believe that Science deserves a more efficient, ethical, and transparent system of communication, validation and evaluation.

We investigate, develop, and promote new ideas, models, and tools for the next generation of scholarly communication.

What we do

How to join

We are an open group of volunteers that always welcomes new members with new ideas and skills. You can join as a member to support our projects and actions or become part of our working team if you are willing to invest a little more of your time and energy!

Our projects

Notify Project

We participate in the Notify project, led by COAR and funded by the Arcadia Foundation, to develop a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach to linking research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from external services such as overlay-journals and open peer review services.

Psicológica Journal

We coordinate a partnership between Psicológica, the journal of the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology (SEPEX), and DIGITAL.CSIC, the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) to offer a novel model of sustainable Diamond (free) Open Access enabled by advanced Repository-as-a-Publisher services.

Next Generation Repositories

We collaborated with COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) to develop a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication that can be collectively managed by the scholarly community.

Open Peer Review for Institutional Repositories

In this project we developed an open source module to enable the open peer review of digital content deposited in institutional repositories. This additional functionality can help the academic community replace commercial publishers with university libraries.

Journal-independent Peer Review

We propose an innovative research evaluation model, which challenges the assumption that formal peer review can only be arranged and handled by journal editors. We invite you to read and sign our independent peer review manifesto!

LIBRE

Back in the days when arXiv was the only available preprint archive and overlay peer review was science fiction, we developed a prototype of a multidisciplinary repository with overlay journal-like services.