Beyond the Journal Awards

Overview

Academic journals can slow discovery, reward prestige over truth, and lock publicly-funded knowledge behind paywalls. Many people are already demonstrating better ways of working. They are sharing results openly, testing ideas in real time, and building communities that make science faster and more transparent.

We want to recognize, celebrate, and support those efforts. If you are a practitioner experimenting with novel ways to distribute and share your scientific work, testing unconventional channels, pioneering new formats for research dissemination, or exploring alternative pathways to reach relevant communities, we would like to hear from you.

What we’re doing

We are launching the Beyond the Journal award program to support people who are already experimenting with pushing the boundaries. We are looking for:

• Scientists, engineers, and practitioners sharing research as it happens instead of waiting months or years for publication

• People building open communities around data, methods, and experiments

• Creators who are testing new formats such as blogs, videos, public peer review, or lab notes

• Anyone showing that rigorous science does not require the stamp of a prestigious journal

• Practitioners exploring new approaches we haven’t imagined yet

Selected applicants will receive:

• An award amount of $10,000 or $25,000 to further their project and work

• Recognition as leaders in the future of science communication & participation

• Opportunities to connect with others who are working in the same direction

This program supports practitioners who are directly testing new ways to communicate science—someone who is already doing the work. If you work on infrastructure, such as platforms, tools, or standards, please consider the Navigation Fund Open Science Program, which aligns more closely with this type of work. And, although we think it’s very important, we are not supporting general science communication efforts through this program. We’re trying to find and embolden the novel open science practitioners.

Why this matters now

Open practices already prove that science can move faster without them.

One example: In July 2023, researchers in South Korea posted preprints claiming they had achieved room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductivity using a modified lead-apatite material. The claim spread instantly across social media, drawing millions of views and raising hopes for lossless power grids and levitating trains. Within days, labs worldwide tried to reproduce the results, some reporting hints of support while many others found nothing. Scrutiny quickly exposed flaws in the data and inconsistencies in the methods. By August, the claim had collapsed.

The entire cycle, from headline-grabbing discovery to thorough debunking, unfolded in about three weeks. Under the journal system, that process would likely have taken months to years longer.

This was one new example of how science could work: ideas tested quickly and openly, truth established through scrutiny, not by a masthead. The people building these new paths are worthy of celebration.

Deadline to nominate or apply: October 31st, 2025

Winning Submissions:

Matt Akamatsu co-leads the Discourse Graphs Project, which investigates how modular shared research platforms influence scientists' collaboration and self-efficacy. They share results via directed posts and a live discourse graph, offering a real-time, transparent view of their research on both cell biology and research coordination.

Caroline Kikawa is developing a high-throughput experimental approach to measure how human antibodies inhibit influenza strains, with immediate data sharing to inform annual vaccine selection. By releasing data in real-time on GitHub rather than waiting for publication, her work directly supports global public health and influenza evolution research.

Anshul Kundaje has championed radical openness in genomics for over a decade. He helped build and release large, harmonized genomic data resources, data standards and quality-control tools years before formal publication, enabling rapid community-driven advances in AI models for gene regulation. His lab continues this practice by providing early open access to transformative AI models, methods and rigorous benchmarks, including ChromBPNet, DeepLIFT and TF-MODISCO, accelerating progress in modeling and understanding gene regulation and the genetic basis of disease.

Spencer Greenberg's replication project enhances scientific rigor by publishing findings as freely available blog posts that include original author feedback and transparent ratings. This approach allows for rapid, easy-to-digest verification of studies in top psychology journals, correcting the scientific record more efficiently than traditional methods.

Felix Hol and his team build open-source hardware and software tools to study mosquito behavior and malaria transmission, deploying "pop-up" labs in regions across East Africa and Europe. By sharing their technology and methods immediately with local partners rather than waiting for publication, they accelerate the implementation of public health interventions.

The Rendeiro Lab advances open science through a publicly hosted, open-source lab manual that makes their internal workflows and computational practices transparent and reusable. This living document invites community feedback and embeds reproducibility into the lab's daily research culture.

Bobby Hollingsworth champions open science by preprinting his postdoctoral work, including negative data, and engaging the community through social media and other digital platforms. Rather than publishing in a traditional journal, he recruited an independent editor who coordinated peer review outside conventional publication channels. This approach emphasizes transparency, rapid dissemination, and community-driven feedback, demonstrating that rigorous scientific evaluation can occur independently of high-prestige journals. Building on this ethos, Bobby is now co-founding a nonprofit organization to accelerate the development of targeted therapies, generating and openly sharing datasets to remove bottlenecks in therapeutic delivery across disease areas and modalities. His work exemplifies a ‘publish–review–curate’ model that both advances scientific knowledge and ensures broad public access to foundational research resources.

Award Sponsors: