Media and Information Research Commons, A New Way to Publish Research, Is Launched

The Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) has launched the Media and Information Research Commons, a publishing platform on which research is reviewed and published as a verified record rather than as an article. The platform went live in June 2026 and is open to institutions and individual researchers.

The Commons responds to two problems at once. The first is that AI has changed what research publishing should look like. Academic publishing is built around the journal article: journals sell it, reviewers assess it, and universities count it. That made sense when writing the article was the hardest part of research. It no longer is. AI systems now produce a plausible article, references included, in minutes, and the article has stopped being evidence that any research took place.

The second problem is the business model that the article sustains. Commercial publishers routinely charge authors thousand of euros to publish and charge libraries again to read, while the reviewing is done by academics for free. That arrangement rewards volume, and volume is exactly what paper mills, fabricated references and undeclared AI writing supply. The money does not go to the people who do the research or the reviewing; it goes to publishers whose margins exceed those of most industries.

The Commons is designed to remove both. What is published, reviewed and credited is the research itself: the data and materials, the question and method, the findings, and a full account of how the work was done, including the part done by AI. Each element is published as part of a Verified Research Record, with its own identifier, and can be cited on its own. A written article may accompany the record but is not required. A well-documented dataset with no article is still a complete publication.

Every record is assessed by two reviewers who are paid for their time and whose signed reviews may be published with the record (if they choose to). Automated checks first confirm that references exist, that the AI-use disclosure is complete and that the materials are present. Accepted records receive a permanent public page and can be corrected and built upon by others, with every version kept.

The business model follows the same logic. There is one fee calculated from the hours reviewers spend. A total of 70 percent is paid to the two reviewers; the remainder covers the automated checks, hosting and long-term preservation. Nothing is retained as a publisher’s margin, MJRC publishes its accounts annually (to see the authors who paid and the reviewers who got paid, and reduced fees and waivers are available. Authors pay nothing to be read, keep their copyright, and can publish derived texts anywhere.

The money that changes hands does not close anything. Every record, dataset, codebook, review and AI log is published under a Creative Commons licence and is free to read, cite and reuse. That includes the right to write from it: any researcher who finds a new angle in a published record can use its data and code to write their own article, with attribution to the record. This changes how academic authorship works. The author of the record, the person who produced and documented the research, is credited first; the author of an article drawn from it is credited second, whether or not the two are the same person.

At the centre of the model is a public AI protocol. It starts from the assumption that everyone in research now uses AI in one way or another, and ends the pretence that they do not. Rather than banning or detecting AI, the protocol asks authors to state at which stage of the research they used it and how: every AI-assisted step is logged, AI output that feeds a finding is verified by a person, and a named author signs for each claim. MJRC’s journal, New Ideas in Media and Communication, now operates on the Commons. Researchers can register, and institutions can request participation, at journalismresearch.org/media-and-information-research-commons.

For more information, check the Media and Information Research Commons page.