Here is how journal peer review works: two or three anonymous reviewers evaluate a manuscript before it sees the light of day. They judge potential impact based on a PDF and a cover letter. Editors make a binary decision and the work either enters the scientific record or vanishes into a drawer.
Here is how almost every other knowledge field works: publish first, let the community evaluate openly, and let merit emerge over time through usage, critique, and replication.
Software ships to production. Articles go live. Music drops. Then the real evaluation begins, in public, at scale, continuously.
Science is the outlier. And it shows.
Pre-publication review selects against novelty. Reviewers are conservative by incentive because the status quo is their career. Studies confirm what everyone in academia already suspects: peer review is poor at identifying transformative work and decent at filtering out obvious errors. It is a quality floor, not a merit detector.
The more interesting evaluation happens after publication, when other scientists attempt replication, build on findings, or discover flaws. But this post-publication evaluation has no formal connection to funding, credit, or career advancement.
What if we inverted the process? What if the real assessment, the one that determines funding and recognition, happened after the work existed in the open?
This is what Open Science Funding experiments with: shifting evaluation from gatekeeping before publication to merit recognition after it.
What breaks if we flip the order? What improves?
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