Andrew Cullison » Sympoze to Crowd Source Peer-Review and Create Open-Access Publications

"I [Andrew Cullison] 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. The basic idea is to crowd-source the peer-review process. Crowd-sourcing the peer review process does a number of things to solve problems with the current model...."