Waymark · the editorial platform for scholarly journals
Where it is, where it's been, and who has it now — held by the manuscript itself, instead of reassembled from memory and forwarded mail. The mail still goes out, but who was written to, when, and what came back sits on the record where both sides can see it. Editorial staff stop holding it in their heads, and an editor's day looks the way it always has: the same folders, the same queues, the same consultations.
See it working
Open the live demoSample manuscripts, on free demo hosting — no login needed. The host puts up a loading page of its own while the demo wakes, which can take a minute.
waymark-demo.onrender.com/?invite=tessera-quire-46a73a
Or start with what doesn't change →
Every step marked. Every number explained.
Who this is for
Each sees only what their role permits — an author never sees editorial internals, and every view is authorized on the server, per request (requirements A19, I1–I48).
Where the manuscript stands, in words that mean something outside the editorial office — what it's waiting on, and how long that stage usually takes. Letters still arrive by mail, and they are also on the record, so an author reads the thread in place instead of searching for the message that had the decision in it.
A17–A20, A26 — plain-language status, what is being waited on, and correspondence in one place rather than only in the author's mailboxChasers to whoever owes the next action go out automatically, on a schedule staff can see and change. Nothing is chased twice by accident, and nothing owed slips because the reminder lived in someone's head instead of on the record.
E27 — automatic, configurable chasers, with a Chasing view of what's owed and what came backAn editor-in-chief still pulls in another editor's opinion before deciding, and still works the folders they know. What's new is that the manuscript's full history — every assignment, every invitation, every reversal, and the whole correspondence thread — is on one screen instead of reconstructed from memory and forwarded mail.
E28 — consultations; M20 — the correspondence thread on the manuscript; M1–M59 — the detail screen and its event timelineWhat doesn't change
This is a replacement, not a reinvention. The folder-and-queue model, consultations, and visible paper movement are the parts worth reproducing faithfully — and an editor who came up through the old system should recognize their day.
Why the record had to change
None of the above works if the history keeps moving under it. An author can't be told what a paper is waiting on, and an editor can't be judged fairly, when the system quietly replaces what it recorded last time.
When a first round of reviewer invitations is declined and a second goes out, the second date replaces the first. The associate editor who handled a slow first round looks one to two weeks slower than they were, in a number someone may use to judge them — and the original date is simply gone.
A manuscript that later moves out of the state a report excluded it from can reappear retroactively, so the same report run a month apart returns different counts — and the board meeting spends its time arguing about which printout is right. On Waymark that report is answerable as-of any date, and returns the same numbers every time.
The five commitments
These aren't aspirations. Each is falsifiable in a five-minute demo, and each names a behavior other publishing platforms still have, that this one must not reproduce.
Nobody's work can be quietly rewritten after the fact. A correction is a new entry sitting next to the one it corrects, never a replacement for it.
the assignment-date problem above is structurally impossible when nothing is overwrittenThe figure you took to the board last quarter is still there this quarter. Every report is answerable as-of a point in time, and says which point it used.
re-run any report against last month's as-of date and get last month's numbers, exactlyNobody has to defend a figure they can't explain. Acceptance rate and turnaround time are the two numbers everyone asks for and almost no submission system defines — so the population counted and the arithmetic used are printed next to the figure, not buried in documentation.
every report ships its own Method and Provenance panelA number is never wrong because someone forgot a checkbox. Nothing a journal would want counted is opt-in by accident, and any active filter is shown alongside the result it produced.
transferred papers are included by default, not behind a box someone has to remember to tickThe knowledge that currently lives in one person's side spreadsheet belongs to the journal. Anything staff track as a coloured sticky note or a private convention becomes a typed, queryable, auditable field.
a shadow data model built from sticky notes and side spreadsheets becomes part of the record itselfThe honest alternative
A reporting layer bolted onto an existing platform is the closest, most credible alternative, and it can genuinely help — it can snapshot an unstable system's numbers and make a given query stable.
It has a ceiling, though: it cannot fix the reason the numbers were unstable in the first place, because that reason lives in the platform underneath, which updates rows instead of recording what happened. Nor can a layer touch the workflow complaints — editorial staff have said plainly that those need the system of record itself to change.
Waymark takes the other path: get the history right first, and let reporting, audit, and reproducibility follow from a record most publishing platforms never kept.
Where this actually stands
Published here because a page that hides its open questions reads as sales. These are the same open questions the requirements carry.
Running today, against synthetic data
Still open
The running demo spans an invented family of six journals and entirely synthetic manuscripts, authors, and reviewers — built to show the model, not to stand in for any journal family's real records.
Five minutes, no account
Every claim on this page is falsifiable in the demo. That's the bar it was written to.
Open the live demoSample manuscripts, on free demo hosting — give it a minute to wake, and expect the host's own loading page first.
waymark-demo.onrender.com/?invite=tessera-quire-46a73a