Publish and Evaluate Openly - PEvO science open beta officially launched!
Why PEvO, Why Now
Scientific publishing is due for structural reform. The problems are well documented: opaque peer review, concentrated gatekeeping, access barriers that persist even under open-access mandates, a reputation system built around journal prestige rather than research quality, and recurring integrity failures that the current system is poorly equipped to detect or correct. These observations are not new - researchers, funders, and institutions have debated them for over a decade.
What has been missing is infrastructure.
Open access changed who pays, not who controls
The open-access movement succeeded in establishing the principle that publicly funded research should be publicly available. But in practice, much of what passes for open access has introduced new costs for authors through article processing charges, while leaving editorial control, peer review, and reputation mechanisms in the same hands. The publisher remains the intermediary. The journal name remains the proxy for quality.
This is not a criticism of the effort, just a recognition that access alone does not solve the structural problem. As long as a single entity controls the review process, the publication record, the infrastructure that hosts it and the career prospects of those that do the work, the system retains the vulnerabilities that reform was meant to address.
Scientific integrity starts with transparency
The current system makes it difficult to detect and correct flawed research. Peer review happens behind closed doors, so methodological problems often go unnoticed until after publication. Retractions take years when they happen at all, and the retracted work continues to be cited. Data fabrication, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and selective reporting persist in part because the process that is supposed to catch them is itself opaque and unaccountable.
When evaluation is public, these problems become harder to sustain. Reviews are visible, so the quality of scrutiny can itself be scrutinized. Ratings and reputation reflect community judgment over time, not a single editorial decision. And because the entire record is permanent and auditable, corrections and context travel with the work rather than being buried in separate, easily missed notices.
What a different foundation would look like
Consider a publishing infrastructure with the following properties.
Publications are stored on a public network that no single organisation operates. No server shutdown, acquisition, or policy change can remove a published work. Evaluation is public: peer review happens in the open, reviews are citable contributions, and reviewers build reputation through the quality of their evaluations. A researcher's standing is derived from measurable contributions using a transparent algorithm that anyone can audit, reproduce, or improve, not from the name of the journal that accepted their manuscript. There are no subscription fees and no article processing charges. Publishing and reviewing are free.
Sounds too good to be true? This is exactly what PEvO delivers!
How it works
PEvO (Publish and Evaluate Openly) is a platform for scientific publication and interactive peer evaluation. Papers, reviews, and votes are recorded on a permanent public record that no single entity controls.
Authors publish directly. There is no editorial board that decides what is worthy of consideration. Instead, accredited researchers, verified through institutional affiliation, ORCID or a Web of Trust, evaluate published work through structured reviews and community voting. Reputation scores are computed from these contributions using an open algorithm. The entire process, from submission to evaluation, is transparent and auditable.
The platform is non-profit, open-source (AGPL-3.0), and designed to be forkable. If the community disagrees with how it is run, they can take the code and the data and build something better. That is not a fallback. It is a design principle.
Common concerns
"Similar platforms have been tried before." They have. Most were built as centralised services that asked researchers to trust a new intermediary. PEvO does not operate a database of papers. It uses a public network as its data layer. There is no proprietary lock-in because there is nothing proprietary to lock into.
"This will never reach critical mass." Possibly. But PEvO does not require mass adoption to be useful. A single research group can use it today to publish and evaluate work transparently. Value scales with participation, but it does not start at zero.
"You cannot replace established journals." PEvO is not trying to replace journals. It is providing an alternative infrastructure for researchers who want transparent evaluation and permanent, open publication. The two can coexist. Researchers already post preprints alongside journal submissions. PEvO extends that practice with structured peer evaluation.
Get involved
PEvO is in public beta. The platform is functional: you can create an account, publish a paper, review existing work, and see how reputation scores are computed. Content published during the beta is permanently stored but will not be visible on the platform after launch.
If you believe that scientific communication should be transparent, permanent, and free from gatekeeping, we invite you to participate. Test the site, help creating awareness. We're non-profit and need support from researchers, networkers, designers, developers, and anyone else who has an idea what to improve.
Visit beta.pevo.science, join the Discord, or explore the source code on GitHub.
Great initiative. There is a huge potential for this, especially in controversial topics where retraction is used to discredit legit science.
E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-04739-2
Now it needs to be marketed. Eg. does PEvO has even an X account?
It goes both ways. The issue with papers that don't get retracted and investigators even being threatened for their work seems a little bit bigger.
And no, it still needs a lot more than being marketed. It's an open beta in a test namespace. There is a lot of organizational stuff still missing, integrations, interoperability, other more or less important features. It's been in the making for a decade, no need to rush anything and actively market an unfinished product.
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STOPThis is only true when the fake news is desirable to keep in public view. Retraction of fraudulent or inaccurate research that profits deep pockets can be resisted for decades, such as papers ghost written by Monsanto that claimed glyphosate was harmless that resisted retraction for decades. However, research that threatens deep pockets, such as the thousands of papers showing net harm from the covid jabs, lockdowns, masking, and the other scientifically baseless 'protective' measures imposed since 2020, is retracted almost instantly, or never published at all.
Researchers have resorted to NOSTR to enable their papers to remain publicly available despite the deeply financially compromised journal system retracting their research for money.
PEVO is flawed from the onset because you introduce accreditation, which is used today to prevent people from publishing research that threatens deep pockets. Ten of thousands of doctors have been threatened with losing their licenses to practice medicine, and many that remained dedicated to the facts shown in their criticisms of the covid plandemic have lost their licenses, accreditations, and jobs. The facts are facts regardless of whom publishes them. People can assess for themselves whether they have confidence in research published, and the reproduction of the research enables peers to ascertain whether it is factual or not.
'reputation scores' are highly manipulable, as is obvious from Hive's reputation metric. Introducing such mechanisms as accreditation and reputation introduces means of gatekeeping that will be employed to prevent publication of research that threatens deep pockets, and to enable pretense of fraudulent research to validity. There are mechanisms, such as NOSTR and ArcHive, that simply allow research to be publicly available to people to read and assess for themselves, and neither of them (if ArcHive actually worked) would create potential financial incentive to restrict or promote publication. What is even more potentially useful is a platform that enables people to publish anonymously, so they cannot be extorted by deep pockets.
Thanks!
Edit: extortion is a terrible weapon that prevents researchers dependent on grants and institutions for their livelihoods from publishing research that counters official narratives. Del Bigtree published last year research and OMG style hidden camera expose of exactly that situation, a researcher that dared not publish his findings because he would be vilified by the vast network of captive fact checkers, lose his job, have his reputation slandered by lying spooks, and his evidence of harm he had compiled that was disadvantageous to spooks and the MIC claiming 'safe and effective' would absolutely end his professional career if he published it.
Del Bigtree published it anyway, and also the discussion being covertly recorded that detailed the concerns of the researcher, in an attempt to shield them from the backlash and excoriation that has ended tens of thousands of careers since 2020, and has long been how gatekeepers in science have prevented their errant theories from being publicly disproved. Anyone that looks at published research with an eye to verifying is well aware that most papers published today, >60% of published research, cannot be replicated, for a variety of reasons. Some of it depends on proprietary data that isn't shared, some of it on theoretical models, such as the infamous false claims that the UK would suffer horrendous fatalities from Covid that were used to push the jabs, and a huge number of Nobel Prize winning research has been proved to depend on deliberately falsified data, such as images that have been photoshopped, outright fraud.
Some of the most respected experts in their fields, such as Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Ryan Cole, and many more, tens of thousands of doctors and researchers at the tops of their fields, have been debanked, fired, disaccredited, publicly excoriated, their Wikipedia entries have been vandalized and locked, preventing them from correcting the libel therein, and this threat looms over anyone that dares to publish factual data tyrants, banksters, and spooks depend on keeping secret.
I personally have been beaten in the street and my children's lives threatened when crooked cops sicced their drug dealing snitches on me for publicly revealing their crimes. This is not a rare occurrence, but the heart of the business model of the aforementioned larcenous tyrants that intend to steal everything we own over our dead bodies, and whom literally control the world through bribery, blackmail, and brutal violence, exhaustively detailed in the Epstein files (only some of which have been released, and in which the perps are redacted and the victims publicly exposed), the Panama Papers, and 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man', as well as the history of American Archaeology which crushed the careers of researchers publishing evidence of humans in the Americas prior to ~13kya (such as Ales Hrdlicka, whom founded the Smithsonian Institute, and infamously collected - and destroyed - skeletons and finds which proved his Beringia crossing theory false) for over a century, which together demonstrate a global alliance and network of spooks, banksters, and extortionists run the world today. Jeffrey Epstein was not a random nobody. The Epstein family in Vienna was one of three that funded the home for the indigent in which Adolph Hitler stayed (surviving by selling his clothes) along with the Gutmans and the Rothschilds. He was on the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Steering Committee of the Bilderbergs. He was paid $25M by the Rothschilds to represent them, as he pointed out to Peter Thiel in the Epstein files, saying 'I assume you know I represent the Rothschilds'. He had deep connections to intelligence, going back to the Iran/Contra affair in which he was one of the principal arms dealers along with Adnan Khashoggi. He all but managed Bill Gates, and helped develop Gates' pivot to vaccines, and was an architect of the Covid plandemic. He was integral in the development of BTC. His associations in the modeling industry were the heart of his trafficking girls from E. Europe, and he brought Melania Trump to the US.
He was not an outlier in those circles. The key to the Epstein story is that he is typical of that crowd. He isn't dead, BTW. The body claimed to be his and autopsied had a prostate, but Epstein had a prostatectomy years before that. His exfiltration from the Manhattan jail where he was being held was anonymously reported on 4chan before his fake death was announced, and the DOJ discovered a Lt. at that jail was the reporter of that 4chan post. Donald Trump was his public BFF for ~15 years, and Trump is named in the (so far released) Epstein files more often than God is in the Bible. We need to prevent blackmail, extortion, and violence from being applied to researchers that dare to publish facts that assortment of tyrants and rogues hide from us, and that includes every scientific, financial, and industrial field, because they profit by lying to us about all of it.
That flip side, where papers can be retracted when there is ideological opposition, was foremost in my mind when reading this! The accreditation algorithm can be tuned and weighted by user preference, or it should be. It is useful for those who do not understand a subject to have someone who does to review content in a way that , if you were inclined to understand it, you could learn.
Anonymous contributions could theoretically be submitted by a dedicated account. The reputation of that account would be subject to flux, though. A solution would be for that account to distribute the submissions to sub-accounts according to its own confidence. Only the reputation of the sub-account would be at stake.
We already do this with publications. If you say that the NYT has a history of quoting anonymous sources that turn out to be wrong then you have assessed their reputation. This will weigh on those who respect your judgement for the next time they include an anonymous source. The sub-account analog is found when people state their confidence in individual journalists.
Reputation of fact checkers, medical 'experts', and authorities has proven to be weaponized and fake news. Unless someone you trust is the source of an assessment of reputation, it's not just worthless. It's an active weapon used constantly against us.
Most people don't verify, DYOR, and know the falsity of propaganda outlets, because the proofs they are misleading us isn't front page news. The NY Slimes is a perfect example of this, being essentially an outlet for CIA disinformation and propaganda. Reputation is a weapon. Absent a true network of trust, of people we personally know and trust that do verify facts and assess the veracity of publishers, it can only do harm, because lying spooks and larcenous tyrants continually spew disinformation in order to enslave us, and they control accreditation and reputation in the media they own, which is all corporate media (particularly the Journals like Cell, Nature, and NEJM that are utterly prostituted to their funders), and much of 'alternative' media, like Luke Rudkowski, Alex Jones, and Tim Pool, whom are entirely controlled opposition to the official narrative. Outfits like ResearchGate, TrialSiteNews, Redaction Watch, and others that have traditionally sidestepped the Journals to prevent censorship have lately been increasingly captured, prevented publishing, and have retracted contrarian reports, as well.
You know that is the truth.
Edit: please re-read the comment you reply to above, as edited to provide more information regarding the abuse of reputation and accreditation.