An open-access journal that costs very little to publish in without sacrificing rigor.
Why a new journal? The problems with current options:
1. Publishing costs too much. Several thousand dollars per paper, or a paywall. That fee buys profit margin, work that no longer needs doing, and maintanance of technical debt of legacy publishing tools. If fees are low, the journal probably has low impact.
2. Reviewers are burning out. The people who guarantee quality are overloaded. AI is accelerating the number of submissions, but journals don't allow using AI to help review. The result is a bottleneck that both slows down science and reduces the quality of review.
3. Submitting a paper is bloated with administrative work. Reformatting to house style, rekeying metadata, fighting reference managers, chasing forms. Authors spend hours on tedious work that has nothing to do with science.
4. Scientists now consume papers through AI, and journals aren't built for it. Scientists will soon consume papers mostly indirectly through LLMs. The future is already here. Overall, that's a good thing, but it means that the tools we use to read and interact with papers need to evolve. Traditional articles are in the best case HTML pages, or, worse, PDFs built for print. That's slowing down the transition to the future of literature consumption.
The root cause of these problems
Science and publication is complex and there are many factors involved, but two critical factors are these: First, technical debt: journals run on systems and formats built for the past. They are designed for an editor's workflow, not for how papers are written or read today. Second, journals exploit their reputational capital: scientists supply the writing, reviewing, and editing for free, and traditional publishing isn't adapting quickly enough to the new reality.
These problems are solvable. PABC is the journal built to solve them.
What we do differently
Radically cheaper
Our APC targets $500 per article, fully open access, and not subsidized but temporary funding. The work genuinely costs less, because production is automated and review manages itself.
Less work for authors because AI does the tedious parts
We simplified the submission process so machines do the work. Submission is in plain markdown, so programmatic checks are more efficient and more powerful. Automated checks report to you within minutes of submitting. No template, no re-typesetting, no submission formatter. House-style trivia is corrected for you rather than mailed back. A single system carries the document from submission through review, proofing, and publication, instead of a separate tool bolted on for each step.
Reviewers who already said yes
No cold-emailing strangers and waiting. Reviewing is a condition of Academy membership, so the pool has already committed.
Reviewing people don't dread
AI helps select reviewers with the right fit Reviewers get the finished, publication-quality article, with figures in place, and comment directly on it, the way you would in a Google Doc. Better to review means better feedback. And, reviewers are rewarded for the work they do, because they can publish at much lower cost as a benefit of society membership.
We welcome AI-assisted authoring
We encourage using AI in the drafting, submission, and checking process. We're not looking for AI-generated papers, but see no problem with AI-assisted writing up of your ideas and your work. Submission is API-oriented and we provide LLM skills so AI agents can prepare and submit a paper for you. We also serve the articles in multiple forms, notably including markdown format for more efficient LLM consumption.
We welcome AI-assisted review
The traditional model looks down on AI-assisted review, but we build for it. AI reviewers search the prior art, check whether methods are complete enough to reproduce, and flag clarity problems before a human opens the paper. These AI reports are provided to reviewers to streamline review. AI never renders judgment, but it can help humans do their job better.
Comparison to traditional publishing
| 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.