The Open Review Toolkit is a project led by Matthew Salganik, a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. The project has received financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Open Review Toolkit grew out of a desire to improve the way that academic books are published. In particular, it sought to develop a process that could simultaneously lead to better books, higher sales, and increased access to knowledge. Authors, publishers, and the public all share these goals, although they might prioritize them differently. Rather than seeing these goals as being in conflict, the Open Review process seeks to use new technology to advance all of them.

The first Open Review website, which was inspired by earlier innovations in academic publishing, was built for Matthew Salganik’s book: Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, which will be published by Princeton University Press in 2017. The web development for that project was done by the Agathon Group, particularly Luke Baker (coding) and Paul Yuen (design). The Open Review Toolkit grew out of that initial code and design.

The Open Review Toolkit would like to thank Meagan Levinson and Princeton University Press for their support during the first Open Review process.

Finally, the Open Review Toolkit builds on some amazing open source software. We’d like to thank everyone who contributed to these projects: Pandoc, LaTeX, hypothes.is, Vagrant, Ansible, Middleman, Bootstrap, Nokogiri, GNU Make, and Bundler.