There are many systemic problems in academia. Click here to see our vision for resolving them, and how you can help.

We believe that collective action could be a powerful tool in addressing systemic problems in academia, from the ‘publish-or-perish’ culture to poor employment conditions and associated mental health problems. Many of these problems exist because researchers keep ‘playing the game’, rather than unifying around new rules that we want to play by. Our vision is to create a ‘marketplace of ideas’ for distributed communities of researchers to self-organise and address systemic problems in academia.

In the short-term, we’re planning to host a new range of small-scale campaigns for the platform, based on community feedback about our 3 flagship campaigns (Green, Gold and Platinum Open Access). These new campaigns will target simple actions (e.g., submit a Registered Report) across a wide range of open science behaviours (including but not limited to publishing) and use small thresholds to increase our chances of success (e.g., 100 pledges). Our plan is to bring a few small-scale campaigns to threshold, demonstrate the crowdacting concept in action, and then build on that momentum to host ever-larger and more broad-reaching campaigns in the future.

If you’d like to collaborate to develop new campaigns for the website, head over to our Github discussion page where all campaigns are discussed as separate ‘Issues’. See the Readme for guidelines on posting new campaigns, or support any of the existing campaign proposals by adding feedback or even just a thumbs up to show you’re interested. Also make sure to sign into the platform with ORCID so we can keep you informed as the campaigns progress.

New campaigns will be vetted to ensure that they advance open science principles and serve the needs of researchers. Beyond that, you will be able to create any campaign that serves you and your community.

(ignore the pledge button below, this is just a dummy campaign :))