Sympoze started off as a social bookmarking site for philosophers, where people would share bookmarks to sites, articles, etc. they found philosophically interesting.
Recently they changed their purpose to “a network of high-quality academic publications from various disciplines that utilizes crowd sourcing for the peer-review process.” They are hoping to improve the peer review process by inviting a “crowd” to sign up as volunteer reviewers, who will review manuscripts as they have time and interest to do so. Those that pass this process (they have “a higher acceptance to rejection ratio”) will be published in an open-source journal within a discipline, posted on site for free. There are multiple disciplines involved, not just philosophy.
But they need volunteer reviewers to make this work. See the Sympoze website for more and consider volunteering for this innovative and promising project!
Update November 2012: Sympoze is still around, gathering volunteers, so please consider volunteering. You can see what they’re working on here. They’ve also started a new project, in which philosophers who are planning to travel to a certain city put up a listing saying they’re willing to give talks there. People looking for philosophers to give a talk can search to see who is available. See more here.
