Waymark · the editorial platform for scholarly journals
A manuscript submission and peer-review platform built from an append-only event log, not the row-overwriting model most publishing platforms still run on. The record only ever gains entries — nothing a journal has ever recorded can be silently overwritten.
Open the demo
https://waymark-demo.onrender.com/?invite=tessera-quire-46a73aThe link is the whole login. Nothing to install, nothing to create, no password to keep.
The failure this fixes
Where a journal's reports don't add up, the reason usually isn't the reports — it's that the platform underneath them updates rows instead of recording history.
When a first round of reviewer invitations is declined and a second round 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 — 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. On Waymark, that same report is answerable as-of any date and returns the same numbers every time.
The message hierarchy
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.
No state transition overwrites its predecessor. A correction is a new event sitting next to the one it corrects, not a replacement for it.
the assignment-date bug above is structurally impossible on an append-only logThe same query over the same range returns the same answer forever. Every report is answerable as-of a point in time, and states which point it used.
re-run any report against last month's as-of date and get last month's numbers, exactlyAcceptance rate and turnaround time are the two figures everyone asks for and almost no submission system defines. The population counted and the arithmetic used are published next to the figure, not buried in documentation.
every report ships its own Method and Provenance panelNothing a journal would want counted is opt-in by accident. Any active filter is shown alongside the result it produced.
transferred papers are included by default, not behind a checkbox someone has to rememberAnything staff currently track as a colored sticky note or a spreadsheet convention becomes a typed, queryable, auditable field.
a shadow data model built from sticky notes and side spreadsheets becomes part of the record itselfOne more, for the people it happens to
The five commitments above are about the record. This one is about the two people waiting on it — stated separately because it runs in both directions at once.
A submitting author sees where a manuscript stands in language that means something to them, not an internal queue name — what it's waiting on, and how long that stage usually takes. Every message about the manuscript lives in one place, so an update never requires an email asking for one.
requirements A17–A20: a plain-language status view, what's being waited on, and all correspondence in one placeChasers to whoever owes the next action go out automatically, on a configurable schedule staff can see. Nothing is chased twice by accident, and nothing owed slips because the reminder lived in someone's head instead of the record.
requirement E27, demonstrated in Waymark Reports' Chasing tab: what's owed, who was chased, and what came backWhat doesn't change
The folder-and-queue model, consultations, and visible paper movement are worth reproducing faithfully — an editor's day should stay recognizable.
The 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 events. 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 event history right first, and let reporting, audit, and reproducibility follow from a data model most publishing platforms never had.
Where this actually stands
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.