XSci at the 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair: Forging New Partnerships
Dr Gareth Dyke, Director of Partnerships at XSci, attended the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, where he met with colleagues and potential partners across scholarly publishing. The conversations centred on one question: how the checking of research can be brought up to speed with its production, and who is best placed to help?
The fair ran from 7 to 11 October 2026, and is the largest gathering of the international publishing industry. For XSci, a platform built on open review, this fair is the natural place to test whether the appetite for change matches the rhetoric.
Three potential partnerships at the top of the list
- Bentham Science Publishers. A longstanding international publisher of peer-reviewed journals, Bentham brings a portfolio spanning pharmaceutical, biomedical, engineering and computer science titles, and a direct interest in how review capacity and reviewer incentives can be strengthened at scale.
- University of Toronto Press. One of Canada’s largest and oldest academic publishers, UTP publishes journals and books across the humanities and social sciences. The humanities and social sciences are fields where reviewer supply is untested, and where a paid, on-the-record review model may look different from the sciences.
- 4Evolution Digital Services. A digital services provider working with publishers on platform and workflow infrastructure. Partnerships of this kind matter for a simple reason: open review only reaches scale if the systems publishers already use can carry it.
Why partnerships matter to XSci
XSci is a preprint platform where papers are reviewed in the open. Authors post for free and get a DOI. They can choose from the top AI reviewers in one place and publish the reports beside the paper, and they can request a review from an independent expert in the field. If the expert judges that the paper has the potential to be published in the journals the authors are aiming at, it carries a public badge: XSci Peer-Certified. The expert is paid the same whatever the verdict.
Organisations interested in working with XSci can reach Dr Dyke at press@xsci.com.
XSci Open Review Competition 2026
The competition is the first public test of that model at any scale. Up to 100 preprints, in any discipline, receive a free review from an independent expert in the field, who answers the question every author wants answered: does this paper have the potential to be published in the journal I am aiming at? Papers the expert certifies become XSci Peer-Certified Preprints, and with the report made public, their authors receive the XSci Open Review Award 2026 and a $500 cash prize.
The competition is open until 30 November 2026, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth. Submission is free, authors keep all rights, and up to 60 papers are selected on a rolling basis, so early submission is encouraged.