Last night, at 10.30pm, I had the pleasure of connecting with David B Horne. He is an ex-CFO based in London whose TED talk on levelling the playing field in business can be found here. Anyone who knows me knows I go to bed very early, so I rubbed my eyes awake after a pre-meeting snooze and tried to make the most of the 30 minutes he had so generously given me.

He said, 'ok, pitch me, what’s the problem, what’s your solution?’ I told him. And at the end of the conversation, he said “I think you have a good idea”. In the middle of this affirming conversation, he gave me plenty of tips of how to leave my blissful and safe home-office world - where my idea for a new way of disseminating academic research is fully sketched out - to the real world where I bring it to life. One of those ideas was to crowdfund the development of the prototype. In addition to it being the way to have lift off, it also demonstrates to the bigger end of town with the deep pockets looking to invest in businesses with a strong commitment to social impact and justice that there is traction; that lots of people would be willing to part with $50 to see a new system be developed.

I always knew that while some people do have it rougher than others in the academic publishing world my experiences were not isolated, and that it was together, as a collective, that things would be able to really move. My conversation last night was the nudge that that time had now arrived. If you are someone who is unhappy with the current peer review system in any way and are seeking something better, or work with people who you know are unhappy with it, please share/tweet this post as widely as possible and ask them to email me (p.sawrikar@promotingwomeninacademia.com) so that I can begin collating a list of people that I can reach out to shortly seeking crowdfunding for the development of the prototype.

The current peer review system was developed as a way of assuring the public that the data each scholarly journal was publishing was trustworthy and not ‘fake news’. It still fulfills this mission but it is also fraught with immense problems. When anywhere up to 90% of research manuscripts are being rejected, and only the tip of the iceberg of what is being found is being published, there’s a problem about the accuracy and breadth of the world’s knowledge base. Yes, a lot of it is crap and should be rejected - I know because I review it. But a lot of it isn’t.

Please copy this text (or similar) into an email:

Subject: Crowdfunding prototype for new academic publishing system

Hello Pooja,

I am willing to donate $50 to assist with the cost of developing the prototype of your new academic publishing system. Please add my email address to your list so that you can contact me later in the year when you are ready to begin crowdfunding.

Kind regards,

[Your name]