The promise of portable peer review took a fatal blow earlier this year as Rubriq, the company that began a radical experiment to disrupt the peer review process, quietly closed its service after years of unremarkable uptake.
When I last reported on Rubriq earlier this year, just 30 manuscripts were reviewed over the prior three months. According to Damian Pattinson, VP of Publishing Innovation at Research Square — the owners of Rubriq, the service has not gone away, just focused entirely on providing peer review and other editorial services to publishers.
On March 1st, Axios Review, a Vancouver-based company decided to close after lackluster uptake. Tim Vines, its founder and chief operating officer, cited several reasons for the lack Axios’s success: price sensitivity, entrenched workflows, and the culture of conducting in-house peer review.