Peer review runs on volunteer labor, and there is not enough of it. Academia rewards publishing far more than reviewing, so many scholars submit more work for review than they review for others. The result is familiar: editors struggle to find reviewers, reviewers are overloaded, and review quality suffers.

Reciprocal Reviews tries to correct that imbalance in two ways.

Making reviewer availability visible

Venues, meaning conferences and journals, can define reviewing roles and let scholars volunteer for them, saying what they are willing to review and how much. Editors get a list of genuinely available reviewers with stated expertise and capacity, instead of guessing from memory and hoping for replies.

A venue can use this on its own, without any of the token machinery below.

Putting a cost on creating reviewing labor

Venues that want to can use tokens, a currency representing reviewing labor. You earn tokens by reviewing and spend them when you submit work for review. The intent is not to create a market but to make an existing, invisible debt visible: submitting a paper creates work for other people, and this is one way of acknowledging it.

Each venue mints its own currency and sets its own costs and compensation. Venues that prefer not to use tokens at all can be marked payment-free.

Where the money is

Nowhere. Tokens are not money, cannot be bought, and have no value outside the venue that issued them. Reciprocal Reviews is a research project testing whether these mechanisms actually help sustain peer review.