Liberata: Open-Source Academic Publishing with Incentive Structures for Peer Review and Replications (2025-2026) | Bass Connections

The academic publishing system today has three major problems that render it increasingly untenable for modern academic research. First, the metric problem: the lack of accurate metrics on scientific contributions causes nepotistic citations and marginalization of certain demographics from career advancement opportunities. Second, the curation problem: the lack of well-designed incentives for peer review leads to poor quality peer review, which reinforces academia’s dependency on proxy signals of quality like journal prestige. Third, the replication crisis: the lack of any incentives for replicating a study causes most scientific findings to have only a single study backing them.

As a result, retraction rates have been steadily on the rise. This leads to mistrust of scientific literature by academia and the general public. Creative solutions are needed in order to improve fairness, equity and trustworthiness in the academic publishing system. Liberata aims to simultaneously solve these three issues using game-theory-designed incentive structures inspired by the most successful financial instruments and marketplaces devised in human history.