An open-access journal for computational biology that costs almost nothing to publish in — without sacrificing rigor.
The problem
Publishing a paper costs several thousand dollars. That fee buys real work — but most of it is work that no longer needs doing: converting documents that were never computable, and staffing an office to email reviewers until enough of them say yes.
Both problems are self-inflicted, and both are now solvable. PABC is the journal built on that assumption.
What we do differently
Radically cheaper
Under $1000 per article, fully open access. Not subsidized by grant money that runs out — the work genuinely costs less, because production is automatic and review manages itself.
Much less work for authors
Write markdown. No template, no re-typesetting, no submission formatter. House-style trivia is corrected for you rather than mailed back. Automated checks report to you within minutes of submitting.
Reviewers who already said yes
No cold-emailing strangers and waiting. Reviewing is a condition of Academy membership, so the pool has already committed — and reviewers self-select the papers that fit them.
Reviewing people don't dread
Reviewers get the finished, publication-quality article — figures in place, properly typeset — and comment directly on it, the way you would in a Google Doc. Better to review means better feedback.
AI does the tedious parts
AI reviewers search the prior art, check whether methods are complete enough to reproduce, and flag clarity problems before a human opens the paper. AI never renders judgment — no tier, no verdict, no weight in a decision.
Every contribution is first-class
Software, methods, data resources, benchmarks, replications, and negative results are published as what they are — no manufactured novelty claim required.
Point by point
| Traditional publishing | PABC |
|---|---|
| Accepts any format; staff convert it by hand | Markdown only; web and print generated from one source |
| Editors cold-email strangers and wait for a yes | Members review as a condition of membership |
| An editor guesses who might fit | Reviewers self-select the papers that match them |
| Reviewers get a double-spaced manuscript with figures at the end | Reviewers get the finished, typeset article with figures in place |
| Feedback compiled into a numbered list and emailed back | Comments left directly on the paper, like a Google Doc |
| Prior-art checking is tedious, so it gets skipped | AI reviewers search prior art and check rigor before a human opens the paper |
| Manuscripts returned to authors over house-style trivia | Small mechanical fixes made automatically and shown to you |
| Problems surface months later, in review | Automated checks report to the author within minutes |
| Review service is invisible and unrewarded | Review service is recorded, credited, and rewarded |
| Several thousand dollars, sometimes behind a paywall | Under $1000, always open, authors keep copyright |
Why this is possible now
AI can do the checking
Resolving every reference, verifying that cited papers support the claims made about them, checking that methods are complete enough to reproduce — the careful, repetitive reading that used to consume salaries now runs on every submission in minutes.
No inherited technical debt
Established publishers run workflows designed for paper and retrofitted for PDF, where every irregular case needs a person. A system built today on a computable source format simply does not have that inheritance.
Software got cheap to build
AI-assisted development collapsed the cost of building serious systems. HydraPub was built by a research lab, not a publisher's engineering department. The incumbent advantage was never scientific.
The Academy's leadership is not yet seated, and PABC has not published its first article. The commitments above are fixed; many specifics — the exact fee, the tier structure, what review points are worth — are still open questions. See what's settled and what isn't.