Liberata: Open-Source Academic Publishing with Incentive Structures for Peer Review and Replications (2025-2026)
Background
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.
Project Description
This project team will build a competitor to ArXiv, the most popular open source publishing system in academia with the critical flaw of no quality control and replications. Liberata will combat problems in academic publishing by replacing the present system of ordinal (1st, 2nd, etc.) authorship positions on academic manuscripts with “contribution shares,” which quantify authors’ relative contributions on that manuscript’s work.
This system, which is designed with game theory analysis, allows for several beneficial features, including a marketplace system that incentivizes peer review; a marketplace for matching articles with scholars who are incentivized to replicate them; and unprecedentedly accurate metrics for analyzing distribution of shares and citation counts across papers. These features together will help democratize access academic research by divorcing academia from private publishing companies, improving fairness and equity in recognizing work done, and increasing societal trust in science by accountable quality control mechanisms.
Liberata’s existing landing page, explainer video and draft technical paper are complete. This project will be to implement and raise awareness about this innovative academic publishing platform. Team members will be divided into three subteams: web design, mechanism design and artistic design. The web design team will implement all Liberata platform features and functions (publication database, marketplace and matching algorithms). The mechanism design team will focus on designing the game theory and economic mechanisms of share assignment and metrics. The artistic design team will create communication, educational and outreach materials.
Anticipated Outputs
Liberata system implemented as a web platform; Liberata FAQ videos, media kits, conference presentations, media features (e.g., podcasts, news articles or video interviews); published paper on the Liberata system in the Liberata system; published paper(s) on methods of detecting risk premiums of different research labs, cost of replication across scientific fields, collusion, labor exploitation, etc.; strategic “go-to-market” plans for displacing private publishing companies and collaborations and/or competition with other open source platforms
Student Opportunities
Ideally, this project team will include 2 graduate students and 4 undergraduate students. Each subteam will require students with different skill sets. Interested applicants may be from fields such as computer science, mathematics, economics, ethics, communications, graphic design or visual/multimedia arts. Graduate students with robust experience in app/web development, nonprofit technology project management, science policy, game theory or financial analysis will be particularly strong applicants. All team members must be interested in academic research as a system and its financial and ethical issues, but need not have preexisting knowledge in that area.
Students will learn about game theory, economics and financial markets and apply those to solve a serious societal problems; algorithms, metrics design, graphs and matrices, and implement these on challenging and interesting problems; and video editing, graphics design, pitch deck design, and marketing & presentation skills with state of the art industry tools and practices. They will also have the opportunity to network with industry and academic experts as they lead information and lecture sessions on the skillsets above. All team members will make a lasting impact on science and society.
This project includes an optional summer component from May 12 to August 29, 2025 in which students will work 10 hours per week helping prepare Liberata for launch.
Timing
Summer 2025 – Spring 2026
- Summer 2025 (optional): Finish technical paper, explainer video and landing page
- Fall 2025: Conduct literature review; implement Liberata website; test Liberata process; complete FAQ videos
- Spring 2026: Complete media kit; present at academic conferences; integrate Liberata with ORCID author identification system; form Liberata governance council
Crediting
Academic credit available for fall and spring semesters; summer funding available