Anna Laura Schlimm

The researchers tasked with furthering humankind’s knowledge are faced with a perverse incentive system that stems from the way modern academia measures success - publish in top-tier journals and advance your career, or fail to do so and perish. Traditional for-profit academic publishers exploit their status as the gatekeepers of knowledge, not only by sequestering knowledge from the public behind paywalls, but by placing emphasis on novelty and flashy results rather than sound science. This leads to the proliferation of unreliable research and translates into a staggering loss of time and resources for society on multiple levels. 

By leveraging peer review, currently exclusively controlled by journals, Peer Portal provides an alternative ecosystem for researchers to build reputations. It aims to challenge both the power structures and metrics of success that currently govern academia.