The Unjournal is making research better by evaluating what really matters. We aim to make rigorous research more impactful and impactful research more rigorous.
The academic journal system is out of date, discourages innovation, and encourages rent-seeking.
The Unjournal is not a journal. We don’t publish research. Instead, we commission (and pay for) open, rigorous expert evaluation of publicly-hosted research. We make it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings of their work, so they can focus on doing better research rather than journal-shopping.
We currently focus on quantitative work that informs global priorities, especially in economics, policy, and social science. We focus on what's practically important to researchers, policy-makers, and the world.
Broadly, our goal is to commission high-quality evaluations of the research we deem potentially impactful. We then want to communicate the findings to relevant stakeholders - researchers, authors of the research, and organizations using specific research questions to make funding decisions.
Our main aims are:
Commissioning and publishing high-quality evaluations of influential work (evaluations engaging the arguments, methods, assumptions, econometrics/statistics, empirics, data)
Tracking/benchmarking evaluations/ratings against traditional publication outcomes, bibliometrics, and replication.
Increasing the visibility of our evaluations by promoting evaluator awards and prizes, cooperating with other organizations in open science & EA space, and increasing the viability of The Unjournal model as an alternative to traditional peer review.
The funding will cover 6 months of our operations. In case the minimum amount is awarded, this will be enough to cover 3 months of our work.
We have already evaluated 47 projects/papers in the past 18 months. We are now more efficient at finding evaluators and managing the process, so we expect that within the next 6 months, we will be able to commission evaluations of 30 more impactful papers.
The funding will contribute to covering the costs of evaluation management - we estimate that it takes $1,267 to manage the evaluation of a research package, which includes two evaluations and a manager's report.
Part of the funding will be used to develop LLM tools that could help us provide evaluations more efficiently.
David Reinstein is the founder of The Unjournal. He is an economist with 25+ years of experience at UC Berkeley, the University of Essex, the University of Exeter, Rethink Priorities, and in other consulting and teaching roles.
Davit Jintcharadze is the operations manager at The Unjournal. He has more than 3 years of experience in project management and operations, as well as research experience in social & clinical psychology. Davit graduated from New York University and the University of Cambridge.
We also have a management team, an advisory board, and a team of field specialists with significant experience across quantitative social sciences. You can view more details about them here.
It is hard to estimate what a complete failure would look like as open evaluations have informational value in their own right. As such, there are no specific outcomes in case of failure, other than a lack of credible alternatives to peer review that don't prioritize impact and transparency.
We raised $605,000 from the Survival & Flourishing fund, as well as from the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund.