XSci featured by David Worlock: “One good answer” for speed and authenticity
David Worlock has featured XSci on his blog, in a post that frames the platform as a welcome addition to scholarly publishing and asks the question that matters most: is it cheap enough, and can it scale?
Worlock, a longtime industry analyst and commentator on scholarly communications, interviewed Shumiao Ouyang, founder of XSci and Associate Professor of Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, for the piece.
What the blog says
Worlock opens by welcoming the launch itself. “The launch of a new pre-print server for scholarly publishing is always good news,” he writes, before singling out the two design choices he finds most interesting: that authors can choose any third-party AI service to validate their work and show those reports on the same page, and that an expert human can then read the paper and certify it.
He is direct about the appeal. “If it is cheap enough what is not to like?”
The post also anticipates how different readers will respond. Some, he suggests, will give positive support to getting reviews and comments available publicly. Others will see certification as close to publishing, and as close as they need to go. And many, he writes, will welcome “the idea of combining machine interrogation with human overview.”
The questions he raises
Worlock does not treat the launch as an unqualified success story, and the post is stronger for it. He asks how many times the scholarly communications business model can be sliced, and notes that XSci’s development was “no doubt encouraged by the contribution of authors’ fees, APC, to publisher revenues.” With open access now around half the marketplace in publisher terms, he writes, some will worry about how sustainable this business model will prove to be.
For others, he says, it will be “a clear sign of the times.” What XSci offers is speed and a form of assurance: it gets authors in front of their audience faster than almost anything else, and that, together with certification, “may yet prove to be the key factors.”
His conclusion is the line we will take away from it:
“If you want to be fast and if you want to be sure that the world sees you as authentic, then here at least is one good answer.”
XSci Open Review Competition 2026
The post lands at a useful moment. The XSci Open Review Competition 2026 is open until 30 November, and up to 60 of the 100 expert-review places are filled on a rolling basis, so early submission counts.
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.
Submission is free, authors keep all rights, and papers may be submitted to any journal at any time.
Why not upload your next preprint to XSci? You might win $500 if your preprint is certified.