Readersourcing—a manifesto

This position paper analyzes the current situation in scholarly publishing and peer review practices and presents three theses: (a) we are going to run out of peer reviewers; (b) it is possible to replace referees with readers, an approach that I have named “Readersourcing”; and (c) it is possible to avoid potential weaknesses in the Readersourcing model by adopting an appropriate quality control mechanism. The readersourcing.org system is then presented as an independent, third-party, nonprofit, and academic/scientific endeavor aimed at quality rating of scholarly literature and scholars, and some possible criticisms are discussed.