If your question is not answered below, fill out this form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
General
Andrew Cullison
Sympoze was founded by Andrew Cullison. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at State University of New York at Fredonia. He also co-founded Academy Geeks, Inc.
Jon Nalewajek
Jon Nalewajek graduated from SUNY Fredonia in May 2010 with a B.S. in Computer Science. He also co-founded Academy Geeks, Inc.
We explain that more here.
- Authors submit papers.
- Papers are collectively reviewed by qualified referees who vote on the papers and post a comment.
- Papers with a higher acceptance to rejection ratio are published in our on-line journal section for that discipline.
- Authors of papers with moderate acceptance to rejection ratios may be asked to revise and resubmit their paper for further review.
- Anyone who submits will receive a copy of their voting records with any comments that the referees anonymously posted.
Once a paper passes the peer-review process it will be immediately published in an open-access format. Papers will also be made available in traditional print volumes for optional purchase.
Submission
Click the submit button at the top of the page.
Note: We won’t be accepting submissions in a discipline until we have a good number of referee volunteers in that area. If you don’t see your discipline listed in the Submission area, it means we need more volunteers to sign-up for referee accounts. So…spread the word!
Yes. Only qualified referees in your field will be able to view your submission. And the referee process is blind.
Referee Process
Anyone with the highest terminal degree in their field, or a graduate student who is pursuing a terminal degree with a letter of support from their graduate supervisor.
Fill out the form to your right.
Spread the word. For crowd-sourced peer-review to work, it needs to start off with a good critical mass of referees. Once we have enough referee volunteers in a discipline, we’ll create a section on the site for submissions from that discipline and create accounts for each volunteer.
Contact Us and request that we add your discipline to the list.
Manually.
We are firmly committed to making sure that this process offers the same high-quality, expert, peer-review that traditional academic journals offer. We’re pretty comfortable doing this for philosophy (since that is the discipline of the person who maintains this site). For other disciplines we will consult people from those disciplines to determine the norms for peer-review in their discipline.
If you would like to volunteer to be an advisor/consultant for your discipline, check the box in the Volunteer form that says – I would also like to be considered to be a consultant/advisor for my discipline.
Yes. Authors will be asked to submit their paper so that it is suitable for blind review. Referee votes and comments will be anonymous.
Yes. Crowd-sourcing is the perfect medium to handle fine-grained specialties, because when tasks are put through a crowd-sourced process, people tend to self-select for areas of expertise. Authors will be able to tag their submission with more fine-grained categories and people will be able to easily view submissions in these specialized areas.
Think about why you referee for other scholarly journals. The same reasons apply here. The academic community needs a quality peer-review process, and part of being a good academic citizen is participating in that process. However, there are additional reasons to consider refereeing for Sympoze.
- Our publications will be open-access.
- You will be contributing to a process that is designed to improve the peer-review experience for all parties (authors, reviewers, and editors) and eliminate some of the headache that goes with the current model.
- You can read more about these benefits here.
We’re currently brainstorming other ways to reward referees. Stay tuned.
We require a University email address from volunteers because it’s an easy way to manually screen for qualified referees. We will, however, consider independent scholars who are not affiliated with a University.
If you are an independent scholar, select “other” as your status when you volunteer and attach an academic CV. We will ask our area advisors to assist us in reviewing your application.
Publishing
Immediately. As soon as a paper clears the peer-review process, we will post it in a public section of the site.
Nope. All papers will be available for free online.
Yes. While the publications will always be available for free online. We will also publish accepted papers in traditional print formats that will be available for optional purchase. These publications will come with traditional catologue ID numbers.
Sympoze is (or will likely be) multiple journals. At the minimum, there will be one journal for each academic discipline with enough interested referees. Sympoze is more like independent press. Once we get enough referees in an area, we’ll start a journal for that field that will be housed in the Sympoze online library. The nature/scope of that journal will be determined in part by what the pool of referees thinks the field needs.
As the pool of referees in a field grows there will be potential for Sympoze to house multiple kinds of journals for a field, and even separate special edited collections that are published as books with their own ISBN number.