About

We are a volunteer community of academics interested in keeping peer review sustainable, for ourselves and our communities. You can learn more about who's contributing and how to contribute yourself on GitHub_🌐.

Stewards

Stewards oversee the platform and its use, guiding design, implementation, and usage with the goal of ensuring the platform is improving the sustainability of academic peer review:

Current stewards are:

• Scholar Lee

Would you like to become a steward? Reach out to any of the stewards above and let's chat.

Theory of change

The theory of change behind this platform is rests upon the following argument:

1. Academia incentivizes, legitimizes, and values publishing over reviewing, in its culture and its many institutions' promotion criteria.
2. Because of these incentives, many scholars do not review at a level that compensates for the reviewing labor they create when submitting, creating an imbalance between the number of submissions to review and the number of reviewers available.
3. This imbalance also contributes in a reduction in quality of reviews, as both publishing incentives and anonymity encourage quick reviews, with the only incentive for quality being reputational loss.
4. This imbalance has historically been addressed through inequitable and arbitrary means that do not address the underlying incentive mismatch:
   • Some scholars review at a much higher rate than others, due to their conscientiousness, or their fear of declining a request from a senior colleague, while others contribute no labor.
   • Some venues place submission caps, limiting discovery in a coarse and ad hoc manner tied to identity that does not account for differences in productivity or resources.
   • Some research communities call for changes to promotion criteria (e.g., tenure packets that only permit a fixed number of publications), but these are often adopted inconsistently across institutions and do not address cultural incentives.
   • Communities try to create reviewer trainings to address quality, but many reviewers to not engage them.
5. The most direct way to address the root cause of the imbalance and review quality is to link rights to publish to high-quality reviewing labor in proportion to a scholar's submissions.
6. Doing this in a direct way, such as requiring authors to review post submission in order for their submission to be published, often does not align with expertise needs or availability, creating a rigid structure for addressing imbalances (much like the rigidity of a bartering system_🌐).
7. Reciprocal Reviews instead proposes to use the well-understood alternative of a currency system_🌐, requiring authors to first earn tokens by reviewing, and then spend those tokens on a right to publish.
8. Creating this alignment not only ensures sufficient labor for the volume of submissions, but requires authors to account for that labor in their own workload by adding a cost to submitting, likely reducing the volume of submissions. It also gives power to editors to set a standard for review quality, only awarding tokens for reviews that meet that standard.
9. Having a more liquid currency to reflect past reviewing effort also allows that currency to be spent in other creative ways, such as gifting labor to colleagues, investing in emerging research areas to defray the labor costs of review, and addressing inequities in academia stemming from resource imbalances, bias, and other factors by reducing or even eliminating some individuals and groups reviewing obligations, based on whatever norms a community wants to set.

We built this platform to test the claims above, and hope you'll join us in this effort!