Institute for Complexity Science
and Advanced Computing
An independent research institute. Free, fast, fully-public peer review across complexity science, information theory, and computing — and accepted authors are gathered into Persistence, the Institute's annual print paperback and ebook.
Science has a gatekeeping problem. The apparatus that controls what gets published — institutional affiliations, article-processing charges, journal subscription fees — filters research before it evaluates it. ICSAC publishes rigorous work across scientific domains without any of that apparatus. Every submission is evaluated on the science alone: the mathematics, the methodology, the honest account of what the work demonstrates and where it fails. Not by the institution that produced it.
Research Programs
Complexity Science
The study of systems whose behavior cannot be inferred from their parts alone.
Across the Sciences
Submissions span the natural, formal, computational, and quantitative social sciences. The institute's named domains are starting points; any rigorous, methodology-first work is in scope.
Advanced Computing
Information processing beyond the digital default, measured on substrate-neutral terms.
Case Study · 01
Rejected for being public — then made more public, in the same hour, by the same publisher.
On 2026-05-12, a Springer Nature journal rejected a manuscript on a similarity score that almost entirely matched the author's own openly-licensed deposits. Seventy-five minutes later, the publisher's own preprint subsidiary deposited yet another copy of the same manuscript — under a new DOI — with a congratulations email. The journal arm and the preprint arm of the same publisher triggered both ends of the contradiction in the same evening.
Read Case 01 →Submit Your Work
ICSAC accepts submissions from researchers across all domains. No institutional affiliation required. No publication fees. The institute's advanced AI panel evaluates the science.
Submit a paper →Open Review
Every paper published at ICSAC carries its full curation record. Panel reviews, quality audits, and curation decisions are published alongside the work.
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