David Reinstein writes:

The “Unjournal” (with funding from the Long Term Future Fund via ACX grants) will not ‘publish any papers in a journal’; we will organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.

Why? Peer review is great, but academic publication processes are wasteful, slow, and rent-extracting. They discourage innovation and encourage a great deal of effort spent ‘gaming the system’. We will both provide an immediate alternative and also offer a bridge to a better system.

We will do this through:

Identifying relevant research work . . .

Paying reviewers to evaluate and give careful feedback on this work. . . .

I don’t know all the details of this one, but I’m sympathetic to this effort, which seems similar to my proposal of journals as recommender systems and advocacy of post-publication review.