English: Step-by-step overview of the proposed process of open publication and evaluation. (1) The paper is instantly published to the entire community. Reception and reviewing commence. Although anyone can review the paper, peer-to-peer editing can help encourage a balanced set of reviewers to get the process started. (2) Reviews and ratings are linked to the paper. They need not be viewed, but are present in the back, “backing up” its claims. (3) Rating averages can be viewed with error bars that tend to shrink as ratings accumulate. (4) Paper evaluation functions (PEFs) can be arbitrarily defined to combine a paper’s evaluative information into a single score. PEFs can be simple, e.g., a weighted average of ratings, where weights can depend on the rating scale (e.g., justification of claims versus importance) or on reviewer information (e.g., well-published senior scientist versus student). PEFs can also be complex, e.g., a Bayesian inference algorithm jointly evaluating the claims of an entire field’s network of papers. (5) The evaluation process is ongoing. In case the paper score rises to a very high percentile with high confidence, presentation to a broad audience is justified.