Who are we?
PEERS is a platform for scientific production, publication, review and dissemination built on the initiative of researchers in critical theory, epistemology and the sociology of science, and based on an in-depth reflection on the future of academia. The aim of PEERS is to provide academics with an optimal and autonomous working environment that takes full advantage of the digital age to usher a new era of entirely open and collaborative science.
The founders of PEERS have joined together in the form of a non-profit association (law 1901) and PEERS will always be entirely free of charge for all users (whether they are readers, evaluators, authors or institutions)
The Problem
We started from the observation that there was growing dissatisfaction with the current publishing system. This dissatisfaction extends to many aspects of the traditional system of scientific publication and we analyze it mainly as the result of a material dependency to the legacies of "paper" journals, a dependency we can break by taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital technology. We offer our analysis in our manifesto.summary
The solution
The PEERS platform is rethinking the current publishing system from scratch to take full advantage of the digital environment. It is built on the model of collaborative sites such as Wikipedia or GitHub and aims to give researchers the tools to develop their own models for publishing, evaluating and disseminating knowledge in an open, transparent, interactive framework. PEERS is a long term solution and represents what we imagine science to be in 2040: open, collaborative, diverse.
If you are currently a researcher, you can :
1. Get your work done
PEERS is primarily an academic workspace. This space, is your dashboard, it is intended to contain all the tools you need: a text editor, a data explorer, a space to organize your work.
The text editor. If you have a .docx or LaTeX of your work ready, you can import it on the site which will automatically transform it into a PEERS document. This editor is specially designed for scientific work and its purpose is to save you time in writing your work. The documents can be published on PEERS in one click, in the form of pre-publication and automatically formatted. You will also be able to export your document in various formats such as .docx, .latex, etc. in order to keep them on your computer or to send them to traditional journals. The text editor allows you to collaborate on your work with co-authors or proofreaders. It also contains data analysis tools with a graphical interface.
In short, our ambition on this first front is to offer a free platform that replaces and enhances what paid sites such as Authorea or Pressbooks do.
2. Disseminating your work
2.1. Types of works you can publish on PEERS
Any scientific work, whether or not it has been published elsewhere (see below) and whatever its stage of development, may be published on PEERS. PEERS makes it possible to publish any form of work, regardless of its length or content.
Here are several examples of works that are particularly interesting to publish on PEERS:
- A work that has no place in traditional journals. In designing the platform, we particularly thought of creating a space that would allow us to accommodate work that has difficulty finding its place in traditional journals. We are thinking for example
- short articles,
- data papers
- interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary work or work that does not fit into a specific discipline
- generally speaking of any other form of work that does not correspond to the canons of the publishable unit.
- A first draft before publication in a traditional journal. Most traditional journals accept works whose first draft has been posted on pre-print sites (such as HAL, ArXIV, SSRN or PEERS). Do not hesitate to contact the journal in which you wish to publish your work to know their policy on pre-prints.
- A self-archiving of a work published in a traditional journal (on the model of HAL, ArXIV, SSRN, etc.). For a list of foreign journals' policies towards self-archiving (see here).
- A work in audio or video form (conference, seminar, course, podcast, interview). This work may be linked (or not) to writings in a multimedia space >see below.
2.2. Benefits of disseminating your work on PEERS
- We have worked on the aesthetics of the site so that your works are highlighted and pleasant to read, both when they are consulted directly on the site and when they are downloaded in .pdf or .epub .
- The PEERS text editor is designed specifically for scientific works, with an automated bibliography and formatting system, an interface much more aesthetic and practical to use than Microsoft Word.
- You can review your work through a versioning system while maintaining control over previous versions.
- Published works containing data analysis can take advantage of the interactive analysis tool.
- Authors of works published on PEERS may choose to retain copyright or choose a creative commons licence.
2.3 Open review
By publishing your work on PEERS, you submit it to the Open Review system.
This may allow you to improve your work and/or subsequently integrate a collection. To know for about Open Review, please check our FAQ.
3. Disseminate the activities of a community of researchers.
PEERS is built on the model of a virtual symposium with two main actors: authors and communities. These communities can be composed of any group of researchers, whether or not they have an account on PEERS.
A "community" is a network of researchers with common interests, which may take the form of collections (equivalent to current journals) or joint research projects. A PEERS community can be a laboratory, a research group, a more or less formal network, a scholarly society or a working group within a scholarly society.
3.1 Types of collections you can publish on PEERS
Any researcher or community can create a collection on PEERS. Collections are the equivalent of journals on PEERS: they are lists of publications (modelled on the Spotify playlists) that may contain written, audio or video works published on or outside PEERS. In creating this collection module, we thought that a set of existing academic activities should be able to be published on PEERS :
- Syllabuses
- Reading lists
- Research notebooks (e.g. working papers collection)
- A collection of books or articles meeting certain criteria around a given theme
- A periodical review
3.2. Advantages of publishing a collection on PEERS rather than and/or in addition to other media
- As with the papers, we have worked on the aesthetics of the PEERS collections to make them pleasant to look at and navigate and to highlight your work.
- The PEERS collections use a unique system of transparency on the conditions of evaluation and voting for the integration of a work into a collection, leaving you free to choose the terms that suit you while giving readers a completely new perspective on the construction of the "journal".
- The PEERS collections differ from traditional journals in that they allow for the integration of both works published on PEERS and works published elsewhere.
- The PEERS collections are multimedia, allowing for the integration of written, audio and video.
Conclusion
Feel free to read more on our different page.