Plan of action

Our strategic direction and goals

What is The Unjournal? See our summary.

Current focus

The Unjournal's pilot phase was completed in August 2023. We are now focused on:

1. Scaling evaluation coverage — Expanding the volume and range of research we evaluate

2. Building field specialist teams — Recruiting experts to monitor and prioritize research in key areas

3. Improving evaluation processes — Refining our metrics, guidelines, and workflow

4. Demonstrating value — Building evidence that Unjournal evaluations provide useful signals about research quality

See the vision and broad plan presented here:

Key resources

• Guidelines for evaluators

• What research do we target?

• Our evaluation workflow

Archived: Pilot phase goals and planning (2022-2023)

What the pilot needed to demonstrate

1. We actually "do something."

2. We can provide credible reviews and ratings that have value as measures of research quality comparable to (or better than) traditional journal systems.

3. We identify important work that informs global priorities.

4. We boost work in innovative and transparent and replicable formats (especially dynamic documents).

5. Authors engage with our process and find it useful.

6. (As a push) Universities, grantmakers, and other arbiters assign value to Unjournal ratings.

Original planning milestones

See our original grant proposal for the detailed 12-month plan we followed during the pilot.

Key elements completed:

• ✅ Built founding committee of experienced researchers

• ✅ Defined scope and principles

• ✅ Set up platforms (moved from Kotahi/Sciety to PubPub)

• ✅ Created submission and evaluation rules

• ✅ Completed pilot evaluations (10 papers, 21 evaluations)