I've been working on improving academic publishing and review from a software angle for a year a half. I think there's a ton of room for improvement here (all

I've been working on improving academic publishing and review from a software angle for a year a half. I think there's a ton of room for improvement here (all the software tools journal teams have available to them leave a lot to be desired). In improving the tooling, I think we can make the work of editors and reviewers a lot easier and that will increase the response time of reviews. We can also help editorial teams that want to experiment with things like multiple submissions, or open submissions. I'm currently building a platform that aims to make these improvements and enable these experiments - the working title is "JournalHub". The one liner might be "Github for Journals". It's in alpha and currently supports preprints and preprint review, journal publishing flows, and post-publication review. I've done a bunch of iteration on the review UX, which draws heavily on Google Docs and Github PRs, and that's getting pretty close to beta. I'm still working on the editorial workflows which are in early alpha. Once we have a platform that a significant number of journals are using, we can then build opt-in experiments with peer review. An example particularly relevant to the OP is potentially allowing multiple submissions where each editorial and review team can see the other's comments and thus multiple journals can collaboratively review a paper and benefit from each other's work. I've talked to editors who actually suggested the idea while doing UX research, so it's not unfathomable that journals might opt-in to something like that. My impression from UX research is that there are actually a lot of editorial teams aware of the problems with journal publishing and eager to experiment, but feeling restricted by the mandates of the commercial publishers. So my main goal right now is to enable editorial teams to escape the commercial publishers, to free their hands, and enable their experiments. I'm still doing UX research and looking for editors and editorial teams interested in talking - so if you're a journal editor and you want to help develop a platform that might help you escape the commercial publishers, reach out! (Email: dbingham@theroadgoeson.com)