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For prospective evaluators

Thanks for your interest in evaluating research for The Unjournal!

{% hint style="info" %} Quick overview: See our evaluator landing page for a visual summary of evaluator benefits, compensation, and the evaluation process. {% endhint %}

Who we are

The Unjournal is a nonprofit organization started in mid-2022. We commission experts to publicly evaluate and rate research. Read more about us here.

What we are asking you to do

  1. Write an evaluation of a specific research paper or project1: essentially a standard, high-quality referee report.
  2. Give quantitative ratings and predictions about the 2research by filling in a structured form.
  3. Answer a short questionnaire about your background and our processes.

See Guidelines for Evaluators for further details and guidance.

Why be an evaluator?

Why use your valuable time writing an Unjournal evaluation? There are several reasons: helping high-impact research users, supporting open science and open access, and getting recognition and financial compensation.

Helping research users, helping science

The Unjournal's goal is to make impactful research more rigorous, and rigorous research more impactful, while supporting open access and open science. We encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings. We evaluate research in high-impact areas that make a difference to global welfare. Your evaluation will:

  1. Help authors improve their research, by giving early, high-quality feedback.
  2. Help improve science by providing open-access, prompt, structured, public evaluations of impactful research.
  3. Inform funding bodies and meta-scientists as we build a database of research quality, strengths and weaknesses in different dimensions. Help research users learn what research to trust, when, and how.

For more on our scientific mission, see here.

Public recognition

Your evaluation will be made public and given a DOI. You have the option to be identified as the author of this evaluation or to remain anonymous, as you prefer.

Financial compensation

You will be given a $200-$400 honorarium3 for providing a prompt4 and complete evaluation and feedback ($100-$300 base + $100 'promptness bonus') in line with our expected standards.

Our current baseline compensation has two tiers, aimed to reward strong previous work doing public evaluations and reviews for us and for others. These tiers are not about academic seniority or credentials.

Minimum base compensation tiers: 5

  1. $100 + $100 for first-time evaluators without demonstrated public review experience
  2. $200-300 + $100 for return Unjournal evaluators and those with previous strong public review experience (for The Unjournal or through other initiatives).

We will be integrating other incentives and prizes into this, and are committed to $450 in average compensation per evaluation, including prizes.

{% hint style="info" %} Aug 21, 2025: We are still committed to a $450 target in the medium-run. However, because of temporary funding concerns, we are adjusting this to a $350 target for (on-time and complete) evaluations that we are commissioning in the near future. Watch this space for updates. {% endhint %}

You will also be eligible for monetary prizes for "most useful and informative evaluation," plus other bonuses.

See also "submitting claims and expenses".

Other ways to show evaluation experience

In addition public evaluations and referee reports, we can accept critical syntheses and literature review papers and essays as example of evaluation experience. You can also share with us an example of a previous strong referee report you have written, that would be suitable for making public given the required permissions. (Also see reviewers-from-previous-journal-submissions.md for a discussion of publicly sharing these).

Additional rewards and incentives

We may occasionally offer additional payments for specifically requested evaluation tasks, or raise the base payments for particularly hard-to-source expertise.

What do I do next?

  • If you have been invited to be an evaluator and want to proceed, simply respond to the email invitation that we have sent you. You will then be sent a link to our evaluation form.
  • To sign up for our evaluator pool, see 'how to get involved'

To learn more about our evaluation process, seeguidelines-for-evaluators. If you are doing an evaluation, we highly recommend you read these guidelines carefully

Note on the evaluation platform (13 Feb 2024)

12 Feb 2024: We are moving to a hosted form/interface in PubPub. That form is still somewhat a work-in-progress, and may need some further guidance; we try to provide this below, but please contact us with any questions. If you prefer6, you can also submit your response in a Google Doc, and share it back with us. Click here to make a new copy of that directly.

Footnotes

  1. We refer to a 'paper or project' here. We encourage the submission of a range of formats, including dynamic documents. See dynamic-documents-vs-living-projects. However, we will refer to this as a 'paper' throughout the discussion below, for simplicity. ↩

  2. You may want to glance at these tables before writing your report, to gain a sense of our priorities. ↩

  3. Updated Aug. 2024 ↩

  4. We will agree on a scheduled deadline. Generally, we aim for a three-week turnaround. Evaluations submitted after the agreed deadline (but still in a reasonable window) will earn a $300 honorarium. ↩

  5. In some cases we may offer more than this. We'll let evaluators know their rate in advance. ↩

  6. We are replacing the Google Docs with the tailored PubPub interface; the PubPub form should be more efficient and leave less room for misunderstanding. But we will still be flexible to let you link or upload your descriptive, free-form evaluation in whatever form you prefer. ↩