by Avi Wolfman-Arent, Chronicle of Higher Ed
In 2011, Tim Peterson was your archetypal frustrated academic. He’d just landed a paper in the journal Cell but had grown disillusioned with the publishing process after nine months of back-and-forth among his team, the reviewers, and the editors. he taught himself to code. And finally, on May 14, all that thinking and coding converged to form a website, Onarbor. The site is intended as a publishing and funding platform for academics, kind of like a Kickstarter for scholarly work. Among its features is that it allows donors to support projects with either Bitcoin or Dogecoin. Onarbor is designed to circumvent the traditional mechanisms of peer review by fostering a community of user-reviewers modeled on the popular tech-help website Stack Overflow. There, users earn reputation points based on the quality of their responses.
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