This is a feature preview shared for feedback — Project Nova is currently in development.
A transparent, APC-free platform where research is peer reviewed openly, compliance is automatic, and science moves faster.
Project Nova is being built to fix something everyone in research already knows is broken: Australian researchers are paying thousands of dollars per paper to make publicly-funded research publicly available. The average APC in 2024 was ~$5,141 AUD. Universities spend millions annually on these charges while publishers post 30–40% profit margins.
Project Nova is a diamond open access platform — APC-free for authors, funded through institutional subscriptions. The cost shifts from individual researchers to institutions who save significantly compared to their current APC spend. NHMRC and ARC compliance is automatic. Peer review is transparent, rigorous, and conflict-of-interest-free by design.
We're gathering feedback from researchers, librarians, and research office staff before building in earnest. Your input determines what gets built first.
Coming from an R&D background — building automated systems, robots, and devices — one thing became clear: the right tools don't just make hard problems easier. They make previously impossible things real. When the infrastructure around a field improves, the work moves faster.
The publishing system surrounding research wasn't designed badly on purpose. It accumulated — structure by structure — into something that now charges researchers thousands of dollars to share publicly-funded work, keeps peer review decisions hidden, and makes compliance a manual afterthought. The researchers doing the work are doing fine. The plumbing around them isn't.
Project Nova is an attempt to rebuild the publication layer for Australian research from the ground up: APC-free publishing, transparent peer review, automated ARC and NHMRC compliance, and full copyright retained by authors. Better tooling, fairer standards, and open access to knowledge aren't just nice to have. They're how we get to the future we're all reaching for.
Vote on the features that matter to you — skip the rest. Leave a comment if you have specific thoughts.
Publish your research openly with no article processing charges. Project Nova is funded through institutional subscriptions — the cost shifts from individual researchers to institutions who already spend millions on existing APC agreements.
Authors keep full copyright — always. Project Nova receives a licence to host and distribute, but you own your work forever. Choose your licence at submission: CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, or CC0. Traditional journals take your money and your copyright. Project Nova takes neither.
Every published paper receives a permanent DOI automatically — the standard identifier required for academic citations, grant reporting, and indexing.
Researchers authenticate and publish with their ORCID identity. Papers link directly to verified author profiles, publication history, and institutional affiliations.
Every paper has two views: a full technical version for researchers, and a plain-language summary anyone can read. Same research, different depth.
Papers move through clear status labels — preprint, under review, published. A full version history is preserved with diffs between versions. Authors and readers always know exactly what stage a paper is at.
Attach datasets, code, images, and supporting materials directly to a paper at submission. Everything stays together, permanently linked to the published record.
Submit in LaTeX, PDF, or HTML. LaTeX is compiled and rendered on the platform with equations and structure preserved — supporting the formats researchers actually write in.
Institutional subscriptions fund the platform. Independent researchers access free or at nominal cost — institutions fund the platform, not individual researchers.
Papers enter a weighted queue ranked by time waiting, field match, and institutional diversity — not payment or prestige. Nothing goes public until two independent reviews are complete.
Gold standard status is unlocked once the field-specific review threshold is met — determined by the paper's ANZSRC field classification. Papers become publicly visible after two independent reviews and are removed from the mandatory pool once gold standard is reached.
Author and reviewer identities are fully anonymised from each other. Reviewer data passes through serialisation — a one-way transformation stripping identifying information at the architectural level. PDF metadata is also stripped.
Background conflict of interest checks run silently via CrossRef and OpenAlex against current employer, previous 1–2 institutions, co-authorship history, and shared grants — plus declared supervisor relationships captured at account registration — all before assignment.
Reviewers can ask authors for clarification without revealing who they are. Requests go through a sanitised channel, have to be tied to a specific methodological question, and are limited in number — not a mechanism for fishing for authorship clues.
Reviewers verify via ORCID, institutional email, or CV submission. Researchers outside traditional institutions can still qualify — the path is just different.
Researchers must complete a peer review before submitting a new paper. Academic reciprocity built into the platform — review participation is the cost of access to the pool.
When reviewers reach substantially different conclusions, the paper gets a conflict tag with a plain explanation of the disagreement. Readers can see it — it doesn't get buried in editorial silence.
Public profiles with publication history, reviewer track record, and institutional affiliation — all verified through ORCID and institutional email.
Researchers verify their institution via institutional email or API. A low-friction check that keeps the platform trustworthy.
Papers funded by ARC or NHMRC grants are automatically flagged as compliant with open access mandates. No manual checklists — compliance is built into the publication workflow.
Link papers to specific ARC or NHMRC grant IDs at submission. Institutional research offices can filter output by funding source for ERA reporting and grant acquittals.
University libraries get a live view of researcher output, OA compliance rates, and review participation. The data is already there — they just get a dashboard for it instead of a spreadsheet.
Project Nova exposes a standard OAI-PMH metadata endpoint so indexers — Google Scholar, BASE, CORE, and institutional repositories — can automatically harvest published papers without manual submission.
One-click export in BibTeX, RIS, or EndNote. Works with Zotero, Mendeley, and every major reference manager.
Full-text search across all published papers, filtered by field, institution, author, and compliance status. Powered by Typesense for fast, typo-tolerant results.
ANZSRC-based field classification combined with author-defined keywords. Every paper is findable through the taxonomy researchers actually use.
A base submission form with field-specific modules built on ANZSRC classifications. Clinical trials, computational work, and humanities papers all need different things from a submission — the form adapts rather than ignoring that.
Share early-stage or in-progress work with the research community before it is ready for formal submission. Invite feedback at the idea stage, not just after completion.
Authors and readers see exactly where a paper sits in the review process — reviews complete, time waiting, and estimated completion based on current pool activity.
Authors can formally appeal a rejection or disputed review outcome. Appeals are assessed by a separate panel — providing accountability without undermining reviewer independence.
After publication, authors rate each review for quality and usefulness. Reputation accumulates over time. Thorough reviewers get more visibility; low-quality ones get less.
Invite co-authors at submission. All listed authors must confirm their contribution before a paper is published — preventing ghost authorship and ensuring every contributor is verified.
Citation counts, h-index, and impact metrics on every researcher profile, updated automatically. Nothing to maintain manually.
A full record of what a researcher has contributed — papers reviewed, comments made, datasets shared. Not just a publication list.
Post-publication corrections and retractions handled transparently with full audit trail. Every change is visible, timestamped, and permanently linked to the original paper.
Structured tools to flag and challenge disputed or retracted findings. If a claim is contested or a paper has been retracted, that context shows up on the paper itself — not buried somewhere in a correction notice.
Export publication records directly to university Current Research Information Systems like Symplectic Elements and Pure. Eliminates the manual data entry that currently falls on researchers.
Save any search query and receive email or in-app notifications when new papers match. Stay current with your field without manually checking the platform.
A live feed of recent and trending papers across all fields and within your specific areas. Good for finding things you didn't know to look for.
AI-powered detection of connections between papers across disciplines. A keyword search won't find a neuroscience paper that's relevant to your ecology work — this might.
Explore the citation network of any paper visually. See what it cites, what cites it, and trace the ideas back to where they came from.
Public and private commenting and annotation directly on papers. Discussion stays attached to the paper rather than scattering across email threads and social media.
Threaded discussions attached to each paper, separate from inline annotations. A structured space for debate, questions, and follow-up findings.
Deposit datasets, code, and raw files directly on Project Nova — permanently linked to the paper they support. No scattering data across third-party platforms that may disappear.
Datasets can be updated with full version history preserved. Each version receives its own DOI — papers always cite the exact dataset version used, maintaining reproducibility permanently.
Structured checklists for data availability, code availability, and pre-registration. Papers that meet each criterion get a visible badge. Readers can see the reproducibility posture of a paper without digging through the methods section.
Authors see views, downloads, citations, and geographic reach for each paper. Understand who is reading your work, not just how many.
Publication performance, review activity, and profile metrics over time in a single dashboard. Everything in one place rather than scattered across different systems.
Full screen reader compatibility, dyslexia-friendly font options, high-contrast mode, and keyboard navigation throughout. Open access means nothing if the platform itself creates barriers.
Compliance flags for major international funders — NIH, Wellcome Trust, UKRI, and others — as Project Nova expands beyond Australia. Researchers with international collaborations get compliance coverage automatically.
Personalised paper recommendations based on your reading history and research profile, using the actual content of papers you engage with — not just keyword matches.
Visual maps of connections between researchers, institutions, and topics. Useful for understanding who is working on what and where the clusters are.
Create a shared profile for your lab or research group, aggregating output, members, and datasets in one place. Makes collaborative work visible and discoverable.
Live collaborative editing on paper drafts before submission. Multiple authors can work simultaneously — no more emailing document versions back and forth.
Native integration with Zotero and Mendeley — save papers directly to your library from Project Nova without copy-pasting metadata. Your reference workflow stays intact.
Link papers to GitHub repositories or Binder-compatible execution environments. Readers can run the code behind a paper directly — turning "we can reproduce this" from a claim into a button.
Score papers on how transparently methodology is reported. Gives readers a quick signal of rigour without reading the full methods section.
Track mentions in news, policy documents, and social media alongside traditional citation counts. See the real-world impact of your research beyond the academic citation graph.
Aggregate analytics on publishing trends and emerging topics across research fields. Useful for researchers tracking where a field is heading, and for librarians and research offices doing strategy work.
Visualise collaboration networks between institutions across the platform. See where partnerships are forming and where gaps exist.
Track how and in what context a paper is cited — whether it is being supported, challenged, or built upon. Citation counts alone miss the story.
Monitor when research is referenced in policy documents or media outlets. Know when your work leaves the academy and enters the real world.
Platform interface and plain-language summaries in multiple languages. Research doesn't stop at English.
Native mobile app for reading, reviewing, and tracking your papers and feed on the go. Peer review shouldn't require sitting at a desk.
When a paper is submitted it enters a pool of papers waiting for reviewers. The order papers surface to potential reviewers is determined entirely by fairness and relevance signals — never by money, prestige, or popularity.
Papers move through distinct stages from submission to gold standard. Nothing becomes publicly visible until at least two independent reviews from verified domain experts are complete. Gold standard thresholds vary by field — reflecting the reality that reviewer pools and quality norms differ significantly across disciplines.
Peer review is skilled labour. Asking researchers to do it for free — while publishers extract billions in profit — is one of the more absurd conventions in academia. Once Project Nova is sustainable, a transparent share of institutional subscription revenue flowing directly to reviewers is something we intend to explore seriously. Nothing is committed yet, but it's a direction we consider foundational to building a platform that actually respects the people it depends on.
When you publish on Project Nova, you retain full copyright over your work. You grant Project Nova a non-exclusive licence to host and distribute the paper — nothing more. Non-exclusive means you can simultaneously post the paper on your personal website, your institutional repository, arXiv, or anywhere else.
Traditional publishers require a copyright transfer as a condition of publication. You sign away ownership of your own work. Project Nova never asks for this. The publishing agreement covers three things only: that you own the work and have the right to publish it, that it doesn't infringe anyone else's copyright, and that Project Nova can host and distribute it.
At submission, authors choose a Creative Commons licence that governs how others can use the work:
Project Nova is a diamond open access platform. Diamond OA means publishing is free for authors and reading is free for everyone. The platform is funded by neither authors nor readers — instead by the institutions and organisations who benefit from their researchers publishing openly.
This is different from gold open access, where authors pay APCs, and green open access, where authors deposit manuscripts in repositories after publishing elsewhere. Diamond OA cuts out both barriers at once: no author fees, no reader paywalls.
In practice the cost doesn't disappear — it shifts to where it can be absorbed more fairly. Universities are already spending millions on APC agreements. Project Nova redirects a fraction of that spend into infrastructure the institution actually controls, rather than into publisher profit margins that consistently run at 30–40%.
Gold standard status is the highest trust signal on Project Nova — but what it takes to earn it varies by field. A single universal review count ignores the reality that academic disciplines have very different reviewer pools, paper types, and quality norms.
The two-tier visibility system applies universally: papers become publicly visible after two independent reviews from verified domain experts. This is the minimum bar across all fields. Nothing goes public with zero or one review.
Gold standard thresholds vary by field size and reviewer availability:
Quality signals matter alongside count: reviewer credential tier, review depth and structure, minimum length, methodology coverage, and whether the review addresses data, interpretation, and conclusions.
Field classifications follow the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) — the same taxonomy Australian universities use for ERA reporting.
Every paper on Project Nova displays a status badge that tells readers exactly where it is in the review process. Unlike traditional publishing where a paper is simply "published" or not, Project Nova makes the review history transparent and granular.
Tell us what features are critical to you, what we've missed, and whether you'd consider using or recommending this platform. Every response is read personally.
Project Nova is currently in early development. If you're a university library, research office, or funding body interested in early partnership or supporting development, we'd like to hear from you.
Early adopter subscriptions, CAUL consortium interest, or co-development arrangements.
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