The Official Launch of Rubriq - Rubriq Blog

"After nearly a year of research and countless interviews with principle investigators, postdocs, journal editors, publishers, funders, and industry experts, we are finally ready to make our plans known publicly. It's great to finally launch our website and share our ideas and plans with the world. It's been interesting to hear the reaction to Rubriq over the last few months. Nearly everyone we've spoken with agreed that there is a big problem in scientific publishing. It’s simply inefficient – on a massive scale. The result is an unnecessary tax of time and energy on the entire global research community.  The good news is we don’t have to start over with a completely new publishing model to address the problem. Our idea is simple.  Let’s keep the traditional peer review approach that (although not perfect) is time-tested as the best method for ensuring we protect the scientific record.  But let’s just do it outside of the lens of any one journal.  An independent, and standard approach that all journals could leverage to make better, faster decisions about what to peer review or publish. It would bring consistency, transparency, and speed to a system known for its sluggishness, opacity, and redundancy.  We also believe it would open up new innovations within the scholarly publishing industry. By creating a pre-publication metric (the R-score) on the quality and interest of an article that can be used by authors and editors, we can all make better decisions and save time. We hope you explore the site, ask questions, help beta test, and inform where we take this service. We don’t claim to have all the answers, but are willing to engage any and all who want to improve scholarly publishing.  We hope you join us!"