Strategy
Our strategy for the short and medium term future is to carve out a new niche within academic publishing. The top journals compete on brand and prestige rather than on innovations that enhance the reliability of the work they publish. While we believe our innovations are profound, we do not expect them alone to motivate the most influential researchers to adopt our platform in place of Nature, Science, PNAS, Cell, The Lancet, Physical Review D, American Economic Review, etc.
Instead, we intend to complement and capitalize on the existing competition among the established journals.
Central to this approach is our concept of Modular Manuscripts—focused, stand-alone publications that thoroughly examine one of the following:
- A single scientific problem or a tightly related set of problems
- Negative results (e.g., results that are not statistically significant, a model that fails to account for data, failure of an experiment to establish hypothesis, etc.) that enhance scientific understanding, yet are rejected by traditional journals
By encouraging authors to refine individual components of their research within these Modular Manuscripts, we help ensure that when they eventually present a traditional, full-length manuscript to a prestige journal, it is already backed by a transparent, iterative process of community-driven scrutiny and validation.
Over time, as authors and reviewers engage more deeply with Modular Manuscripts in the context of our other innovations, this process will become a recognized layer of scholarly discourse. Eventually, we believe that established publishers will come to depend on this problem-level validation as a signal of quality, intellectual rigor and reliability.
Incentivizing Platform Adoption
Scientists collaborate within small, overlapping networks formed through shared academic experiences, such as graduate school, postdoctoral fellowships, or academic lineage. To accelerate adoption, we will strategically engage key networks across multiple disciplines.
Our approach is to partner with principal investigators (PIs), offering small discretionary grants to their labs in exchange for their participation. Each PI commits to:
- Publishing at least one modular manuscript on C-SQD for each submission to a traditional journal.
- Citing this manuscript in the submission to the traditional journal.
- Providing a minimal level of peer review on the platform.
This creates a mutually beneficial arrangement—PIs gain an additional publication and lab funding, while C-SQD overcomes early-stage network effects, driving adoption within the scientific community.
The Referee Campaign
Referee is the place where manuscripts first presented elsewhere - including preprint servers and traditional publishers - can be uploaded, discovered and reviewed on the C-SQD platform.
Business Model
Core Revenue Streams.
- Per-Modular Manuscript Fees.
- Platform Fee: Each published manuscript incurs a modest platform charge. We anticipate fees ranging from $100 - $200.
- (Pass-Through Revenue) Review Fee: Authors may choose among 6 review tiers. We anticipate fees ranging from $0 - $11,200.
- Per-Referee Manuscript Fees.
- Platform Fee: Each submitted manuscript incurs a modest platform charge. We anticipate fees ranging from $10 - $30.
- (Pass-Through Revenue) Review Fee: Authors may choose among 6 review tiers. We anticipate fees ranging from $0 - $11,200.
- Challenge Fees.
- Reviewers seeking to replace an existing featured review with their own review may initiate a challenge. We anticipate challenge fees ranging from $5 - $200.
- Bug Bounty Fees.
- Any member of the platform (including individuals, corporations, governments, etc.) can establish a bug bounty - a payment guaranteed to any reviewer or set of reviewers that submit ElementReviews addressing the bounty criteria. Every bounty has a minimum guaranteed payment, but based on objectively defined criteria released alongside the bounty and evaluated by the bounty author, payment may substantially exceed the minimum. The platform takes a percentage (~5%) of all claimed bounties. Bug bounties are not limited to traditional software "bugs" in submitted code, but may include any specific and easily verifiable issues in a manuscript or supplementary data/code.
- Review Grant Fees.
- Any member of the platform (including individuals, corporations, governments, etc.) can establish a pool of funds along with review criteria. The platform is then required to distribute these funds to reviews that meet the criteria. This can be an effective way to bring attention to scientific or medical topics important to the donor. The platform takes a percentage (~5%) of all review grants.
- Membership Fees.
- All published work on the platform is Open Access (freely available to the public). Access to reviews and other platform features requires membership and verified identity. We anticipate membership fees ranging from $1 - $5 per month.
Review Fee Tiers
For all tiers, 100 percent of the review fee is pass-through and will fund review on the platform. Different tiers provide different guarantees for how much of the fee specifically funds the accompanying manuscript. Whether a manuscript generates review solicitations that match or exceed the review fee paid depends on internal platform algorithms and reviewer engagement. This system balances two competing C-SQD priorities: (1) ensure authors feel they are getting what they pay for in terms of engagement with and constructive criticism of their work; (2) ensure that criticism, an essential pillar of science, is not entirely dependent on how much money an author has. We want to be able to direct review funding towards problem areas in a dynamic, community driven way.
* Tier 1 (< $700): In this tier the author chooses a custom amount below $700. There is no guarantee any of this fee will be applied to the associated manuscript. The fee helps to fund the platform's reviewer funding pool and therefore may be applied to the associated manuscript.
If the chosen fee exceeds $200, the manuscript becomes eligible for algorithmic presentation on user feeds. If the chosen fee is below $200, the platform will not advertise the work but it remains discoverable.
* Tier 2 ($700): Same as Tier 1, except that 30 percent of the fee is guaranteed to fund review of the associated manuscript.
* Tier 3 ($1,400): Same as Tier 1, except that 35 percent of the fee is guaranteed to fund review of the associated manuscript.
* Tier 4 ($2,800): Same as Tier 1, except that 40 percent of the fee is guaranteed to fund review of the associated manuscript.
* Tier 5 ($5,600): Same as Tier 1, except that 45 percent of the fee is guaranteed to fund review of the associated manuscript.
* Tier 6 ($11,200): Same as Tier 1, except that 50 percent of the fee is guaranteed to fund review of the associated manuscript.
Auxiliary Revenue Streams
C-SQD plans to develop an AI assistant for science. The business model for monetizing this service is not yet finalized.
C-SQD plans to directly provide services to other businesses, e.g., analyses of publishing trends, review trends, etc. The business model for monetizing this service is not yet finalized.
C-SQD Conference Partnership Program
C-SQD facilitates a specialized service for conference organizers aimed at streamlining the publication and review process for conference-associated manuscripts. By participating in this program, organizers can benefit from waived platform fees for manuscripts published under their conference banner by paying a single conference fee.
Upon enrollment in the Conference Partnership Program, reviewers who attend the conference are required to add a specific conference tag to their reviewer profiles. This tag is exclusively available to conference attendees, ensuring that only eligible reviewers are matched with manuscripts related to the conference. The C-SQD platform manages the matching process, possibly with input from conference organizers. Reviewers are assigned ElementReviews based on any manuscripts they have submitted as an author, on their other reviewer community tags, and on any criteria provided by the organizers. Conference organizers determine the level of review anonymity before and during the conference, though all reviews are made public after the conference in alignment with C-SQD’s standard policy.
Conference organizers also have the option to mandate that all attendees contribute a predetermined number of ElementReviews. This requirement promotes active engagement in the peer review process and helps maintain the quality and integrity of the conference publications. Additionally, only manuscripts that satisfy certain criteria defined by the conference become eligible for SynthesisReview. All submitted reviews, including both ElementReviews and SynthesisReviews, are incorporated into the reviewers’ public records. This integration provides transparency and acknowledges the contributions of reviewers within the academic community.
Manuscripts published through the conference receive Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) like any other C-SQD publication.
Costs