About Archon

Good research should be judged on its evidence.Not on how well it knows the rules of publishing.

Archon is the work of an editorial team that has spent fourteen years helping researchers take finished studies through peer review. This page explains where it came from, what we are trying to change, and who is responsible for it.

14years in scientific publishing

3,250+manuscripts taken to publication

3,000researchers trained

103seminars delivered

Archon began as Journal Revisions, more than a decade ago, when Ian Scott Kinney, a linguist, moved to Chile to translate manuscripts for researchers. Working through hundreds of them, he saw sound studies turned away for reasons that had little to do with the science: a contribution stated too late, a journal chosen for its prestige rather than its fit. The translations began to come with an editorial analysis, and the analysis grew into seminars and a team of editors working with universities across Latin America.

Fourteen years and more than 3,250 published manuscripts taught us that publishing has a method. It can be written down and taught, and it barely changes between disciplines. Researchers with access to it, usually through a well-resourced lab or a senior co-author, publish. Many equally capable researchers without it do not.

We would like a researcher's chance of publication to depend on the quality of the work, and on very little else.

General-purpose AI promised to close that gap, but it is built to sound right rather than to be right: it invents references and inflates findings. Archon is our answer. We wrote the method down as explicit rules and built agents bound by them: nothing invented, every number traced to the data, every citation checked, and the author remaining the author. The same rules govern our editors, our skill packs, our university licences and our review panel for journals.

For researchers, we want a route to publication that does not depend on who they know; for institutions, funded research reaching the scholarly record with an audit trail behind it; for journals, review that scales without lowering the bar. We intend to be measured by papers that are accepted and still hold up after they are published.

The people behind Archon

A linguist who built an editorial practice, an engineer who turned its method into software, and a physicist-engineer who has worked on both sides of the line between research and industry.

Ian Scott Kinney

CEO & founder

Ian is a linguist by training, educated at Central Washington University. He founded Journal Revisions in Chile, starting with native-English translation for scientific authors and the editorial analysis that later became the core of the company's method. He has since led its growth into a team of editors, translators and reviewers that has taken more than 3,250 manuscripts into Scopus- and Web of Science-indexed journals and delivered over a hundred seminars to universities across Latin America.

His work rests on a conviction that, for an individual researcher, being able to publish and to understand how research is measured means academic mobility, and that wider access to that knowledge is a form of scientific democratisation. He approaches the work in the spirit of kaizen: science is about doing things better, one revision at a time.

Linguistics · Central Washington University
Founder, Journal Revisions
14 years in scientific publishing

Marcos Guzmán Delgado

Co-founder · Archon architect

Marcos is a commercial engineer (Ingeniería Comercial) who spent ten years in the technology industry before joining Journal Revisions. As its business manager in Chile he built the company's working relationships with universities and research institutions, bringing its editorial support to researchers across the country.

He holds that the democratisation of knowledge is closely tied to how research is positioned and found in the digital space where it is now produced and read. That view shaped Archon: together with Ian, he formalised the method refined over fourteen years into explicit rules, and he designed the system of agents and skills that applies them.

Commercial engineering
10 years in the technology industry
Architect of the Archon system

Tomas Zvolensky

Business development

Tomas holds a PhD in radio science and engineering. From 2013 to 2016 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University in the group of David R. Smith, whose work on negative-index media and electromagnetic cloaking is widely regarded as having founded the modern field of metamaterials. His research there concerned metamaterial and metasurface concepts for electromagnetic and antenna applications, and gave him first-hand experience of writing, reviewing and revising for the journals of the field.

A long-standing interest in how research becomes something people use led him from the laboratory to the commercial side of science, including product marketing in the photonics industry. At Archon he works with universities, research offices and publishers, and brings to those conversations a researcher's understanding of what peer review asks of authors.

PhD, radio science and engineering
Postdoc, Duke University · 2013–2016
Metamaterials · group of David R. Smith

Talk to the people who built it

Whether you are a researcher with a finished study, a research office weighing AI policy, or a journal editor looking at review capacity, we are glad to explain how Archon works and where it may not be the right fit.