The Stacks exists to enable experimentation on scientific publishing, in service of open science. It isn’t a journal, a repository, or a general publishing platform. It’s a platform for structured scientific content, built to explore questions like:
How do we know if research is being used?
What does impact look like beyond citations?
How can publishing reflect the modular, connected nature of scientific work?
A few principles guide it:
Author agency: authors publish when they choose, with no pre-publication review gate.
Reader agency: feedback happens in the open, and readers decide what’s useful.
Structured and modular: data, methods, figures, code, and narrative are machine-readable, openly licensed, and reusable by people and AI agents.
Interoperable: publications get DOIs and plug into the wider scholarly ecosystem.
Experimental: trying new ideas is a feature, and failed experiments are something to learn from.