Did you just write a brilliant peer review for an economics (or social science, policy, etc.) journal? Your work should not be wasted, there should be a way to share your insights and get credit!

Consider transforming these insights into a public "independent evaluation" for . This will benefit the community and help make research better and more impactful. And we can share your work and provide you feedback. This will help you build a portfolio with The Unjournal, making it more likely we'll hire you for paid work and compensate you at the higher rate. And we offer prizes for the best work.

You can do this either anonymously or sign your name.

To say this in a fancier way:

Journal peer review is critical for assessing and improving research, but too often these valuable discussions remain hidden behind closed doors. By publishing a version of your review, you can: (1) Amplify the impact of your reviewing efforts by contextualizing the research for a broader audience, (2) Facilitate more transparent academic discussions around the strengths and limitations of the work, (3) Get public recognition for your peer review contributions, which are often unseen and unrewarded (4) Reduce overall reviewing burdens by allowing your assessment to be reused, (5) Support a culture of open scholarship by modeling constructive feedback on public research

Considerations: The reviewer "owns the review", subject to constraints and norms

According to a COPE Discussion document: Who “owns” peer reviews (emphasis added)

While the depth of commentary may vary greatly among reviews, given the minimal thresholds set by copyright law, it can be presumed that most reviews meet the requirements for protection as an “original work of authorship”. As such, in the absence of an express transfer of copyright or a written agreement between the reviewer and publisher establishing the review as a “work for hire”, it may be assumed that, by law, the reviewer holds copyright to their reviewer comments and thus is entitled to share the review however the reviewer deems fit...

The COPE council notes precisely the benefits we are aiming to unlock. They mention an 'expectation of confidentiality' that seems incompletely specified.

For example, reviewers may wish to publish their reviews in order to demonstrate their expertise in a subject matter and to contribute to their careers as a researcher. Or they may see publication of their reviews as advancing discourse on the subject and thus acting for the benefit of science as a whole. Nevertheless, a peer reviewer’s comments are significantly different from many other works of authorship in that they are expressly solicited as a work product by a journal and—whatever the peer review model—are subject to an expectation of confidentiality. However, without an express agreement between the journal and the reviewer, it is questionable whether such obligation of confidentiality should be considered to apply only until a final decision is reached on the manuscript, or to extend indefinitely.

Permission and journals' constraints

Several journals explicitly agree that reviewers are welcome to publish the content of their reviews, with some important caveats. The Publish Your Reviews initiative gathered public statements from several journals and publishers confirming that they support reviewers posting their comments externally. However, they generally ask reviewers to remove any confidential information before sharing their reviews. This includes: the name of the journal, the publication recommendation (e.g., accept, revise, or reject), and any other details the journal or authors considered confidential, such as unpublished data.

For these journals, we are happy to accept and share/link the verbatim content as part of an independent Unjournal evaluation.

But even for journals that have not signed onto this, as the COPE mentioned Your peer review is your intellectual property, it is not owned by the journal!

There may be some terms and conditions you agreed to as part of submitting a referee report. Please consult these carefully.

However, you are still entitled to share your own expert opinions on publicly-shared research. You may want to rewrite the review somewhat. You should make it clear that it refers to the publicly-shared (working paper/preprint) version of the research, not the one the journal shared with you in confidence. As above, you should probably not mention the journal name, the decision, or any other sensitive information. You don't even need to mention that you did review the paper for a journal.

Even if a journal considers the specific review confidential, this doesn't prevent the reviewer from expressing their independent assessment elsewhere.

Make a difference

As an expert reviewer, you have unique insights that can improve the quality and impact of research. Making your assessment available through The Unjournal amplifies the reach and value of your efforts. You can publish evaluations under your name or remain anonymous.

Ready to make your peer reviews work harder for science? Consider submitting an independent evaluation, for recognition, rewards, and to improve research. Contact us anytime at contact@unjournal.org for guidance... We look forward to unlocking your valuable insights!

Impactful research prize winners

Impactful Research Prize Winners

SFF Grant

The Unjournal is delighted to announce the winners of our inaugural Impactful Research Prize. We are awarding our first prize to Takahiro Kubo (NIES Japan and Oxford University) and co-authors for their research titled "Banning wildlife trade can boost demand". The paper stood out for its intriguing question, the potential for policy impact, and methodological strength. We particularly appreciated the authors’ open, active, and detailed engagement with our evaluation process.

The second prize goes to Johannes Haushofer (NUS Singapore and Stockholm University) and co-authors for their work "The Comparative Impacts of Cash Transfers and a Psychotherapy Program on Psychological and Economic Wellbeing". Our evaluators rated this paper among the highest across a range of metrics. It was highly commended for its rigor, the importance of the topic, and the insightful discussion of cost-effectiveness.

We are recognizing exceptional evaluators for credible, insightful evaluations. Congratulations to Phil Trammell (Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford), Hannah Metzler (Complexity Science Hub Vienna), Alex Bates (independent researcher), and Robert Kubinec (NYU Abu Dhabi).

We would like to congratulate all of the winners on their contributions to open science and commitment to rigorous research. We also thank other authors who have submitted their work but have not been selected at this time - we received a lot of excellent submissions, and we are committed to supporting authors beyond this research prize.

Please see the full press release, as well as award details, below and linked here:

An important part of making this a success will be to spread the word, to get positive attention for this project, to get important players on board, network externalities, and change the equilibrium. We are also looking for specific feedback and suggestions from "mainstream academics" in Economics, Psychology, and policy/program evaluation, as well as from the Open Science and EA communities.

Key points to convey

See

As social media blurbs

How and where to promote and share

To indicate your potential interest in roles at The Unjournal, such as those described below, please fill out this quick survey form and link (or upload) your CV or webpage.

• If you already filled out this form for a role that has changed titles, don’t worry. You will still be considered for relevant and related roles in the future.

• If you add your name to this form, we may contact you to offer you the opportunity to do paid project work and paid work tasks.

Furthermore, if you are interested in conducting paid research evaluation for The Unjournal, or in joining our advisory board, please complete the form linked here.

Feel free to contact contact@unjournal.org with any questions.

Quick links to role descriptions below

Administration, operations and management roles

Research & operations-linked roles & projects

Standalone project: Impactful Research Scoping (temp. pause)

Additional information

Express interest in any of these roles in our survey form.

The Unjournal, a not-for-profit collective under the umbrella and fiscal sponsorship of the Open Collective Foundation, is an equal-opportunity employer and contractor. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees, volunteers, and contractors. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetic information, disability, age, or veteran status.

See our data protection statement linked here.

We are not the only ones working and advocating in this space. For a small tip of the iceberg...

Improving peer review in Economics:

Evidence base

• The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals

• Improving Peer Review in Economics: Stocktaking and Proposals

• What Policies Increase Prosocial Behavior? An Experiment with Referees at the Journal of Public Economics

• Are non-monetary rewards effective in attracting peer reviewers? A natural experiment

Progress notes since last update

Update on recent progress: 21 July 2023

Funding

The SFF grant is now 'in our account' (all is public and made transparent on our OCF page). This makes it possible for us to

• move forward in filling staff and contractor positions (see below); and

• increase evaluator compensation and incentives/rewards (see below).

We are circulating a press release sharing our news and plans.

Timelines, and pipelines

Our "Pilot Phase," involving ten papers and roughly 20 evaluations, is almost complete. We just released the evaluation package for "The Governance Of Non-Profits And Their Social Impact: Evidence from a Randomized Program In Healthcare In DRC.” We are now waiting on one last evaluation, followed by author responses and then "publishing" the final two packages at https://unjournal.pubpub.org/. (Remember: we publish the evaluations, responses and synthesis; we link the research being evaluated.)

We will make decisions and award our Impactful Research Prize (and possible seminars) and evaluator prizes soon after. The winners will be determined by a consensus of our management team and advisory board (potentially consulting external expertise). The choices will be largely driven by the ratings and predictions given by Unjournal evaluators. After we make the choices, we will make our decision process public and transparent.

"What research should we prioritize for evaluation, and why?"

We continue to develop processes and policy around which research to prioritize. For example, we are considering whether we should set targets for different fields, for related outcome "cause categories," and for research sources. This discussion continues among our team and with stakeholders. We intend to open up the discussion further, making it public and bringing in a range of voices. The objective is to develop a framework and a systematic process to make these decisions. See our expanding notes and discussion on What is global-priorities relevant research?

In the meantime, we are moving forward with our post-pilot “pipeline” of research evaluation. Our management team is considering recent prominent and influential working papers from the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) and beyond, and we continue to solicit submissions, suggestions, and feedback. We are also reaching out to users of this research (such as NGOs, charity evaluators, and applied research think tanks), asking them to identify research they particularly rely on and are curious about. If you want to join this conversation, we welcome your input.

(Paid) Research opportunity: to help us do this

We are also considering hiring a small number of researchers to each do a one-off (~16 hours) project in “research scoping for evaluation management.” The project is sketched at Unjournal - standalone work task: Research scoping for evaluation management; essentially, summarizing a research theme and its relevance, identifying potentially high-value papers in this area, choosing one paper, and curating it for potential Unjournal evaluation.

We see a lot of value in this task and expect to actually use and credit this work.

If you are interested in applying to do this paid project, please let us know through our CtA survey form here.

Call for "Field Specialists"

Of course, we can't commission the evaluation of every piece of research under the sun (at least not until we get the next grant :) ). Thus, within each area, we need to find the right people to monitor and select the strongest work with the greatest potential for impact, and where Unjournal evaluations can add the most value.

This is a big task and there is a lot of ground to cover. To divide and conquer, we’re partitioning this space (looking at natural divisions between fields, outcomes/causes, and research sources) amongst our management team as well as among what we now call...

"Field Specialists" (FSs), who will

• focus on a particular area of research, policy, or impactful outcome;

• keep track of new or under-considered research with potential for impact;

• explain and assess the extent to which The Unjournal can add value by commissioning this research to be evaluated; and

• “curate” these research objects: adding them to our database, considering what sorts of evaluators might be needed, and what the evaluators might want to focus on; and

• potentially serve as an evaluation manager for this same work.

Field specialists will usually also be members of our Advisory Board, and we are encouraging expressions of interest for both together. (However, these don’t need to be linked in every case.) .

Interested in a field specialist role or other involvement in this process? Please fill out this general involvement form (about 3–5 minutes).

Setting priorities for evaluators

We are also considering how to set priorities for our evaluators. Should they prioritize:

• Giving feedback to authors?

• Helping policymakers assess and use the work?

• Providing a 'career-relevant benchmark' to improve research processes?

We discuss this topic here, considering how each choice relates to our Theory of Change.

Increase in evaluator compensation, incentives/rewards

We want to attract the strongest researchers to evaluate work for The Unjournal, and we want to encourage them to do careful, in-depth, useful work. We've increased the base compensation for (on-time, complete) evaluations to $400, and we are setting aside $150 per evaluation for incentives, rewards, and prizes. Details on this to come.

Please consider signing up for our evaluator pool (fill out the good old form).

Adjacent initiatives and 'mapping this space'

As part of The Unjournal’s general approach, we keep track of (and keep in contact with) other initiatives in open science, open access, robustness and transparency, and encouraging impactful research. We want to be coordinated. We want to partner with other initiatives and tools where there is overlap, and clearly explain where (and why) we differentiate from other efforts. This Airtable view gives a preliminary breakdown of similar and partially-overlapping initiatives, and tries to catalog the similarities and differences to give a picture of who is doing what, and in what fields.

Also to report

New Advisory Board members

• Gary Charness, Professor of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

• Nicolas Treich, Associate Researcher, INRAE, Member, Toulouse School of Economics (animal welfare agenda)

• Anca Hanea, Associate Professor, expert judgment, biosciences, applied probability, uncertainty quantification

• Jordan Dworkin, Program Lead, Impetus Institute for Meta-science

• Michael Wiebe, Data Scientist, Economist Consultant; PhD University of British Columbia (Economics)

Tech and platforms

We're working with PubPub to improve our process and interfaces. We plan to take on a KFG membership to help us work with them closely as they build their platform to be more attractive and useful for The Unjournal and other users.

Our hiring, contracting, and expansion continues

• Our next hiring focus: Communications. We are looking for a strong writer who is comfortable communicating with academics and researchers (particularly in economics, social science, and policy), journalists, policymakers, and philanthropists. Project-based.

• We've chosen (and are in the process of contracting) a strong quantitative meta-scientist and open science advocate for the project: “Aggregation of expert opinion, forecasting, incentives, meta-science.” (Announcement coming soon.)

• We are also expanding our Management Committee and Advisory Board; see calls to action.

Potentially relevant events in the outside world

• Institute for Replication grant

• Clusterfake

Update on recent progress: 1 June 2023

Update from David Reinstein, Founder and Co-Director

A path to change

With the recent news, we now have the opportunity to move forward and really make a difference. I think The Unjournal, along with related initiatives in other fields, should become the place policymakers, grant-makers, and researchers go to consider whether research is reliable and useful. It should be a serious option for researchers looking to get their work evaluated. But how can we start to have a real impact?

Over the next 18 months, we aim to:

1. Build awareness: (Relevant) people and organizations should know what The Unjournal is.

2. Build credibility: The Unjournal must consistently produce insightful, well-informed, and meaningful evaluations and perform effective curation and aggregation of these. The quality of our work should be substantiated and recognized.

3. Expand our scale and scope: We aim to grow significantly while maintaining the highest standards of quality and credibility. Our loose target is to evaluate around 70 papers and projects over the next 18 months while also producing other valuable outputs and metrics.

I sketch these goals HERE, along with our theory of change, specific steps and approaches we are considering, and some "wish-list wins." Please free to add your comments and questions.

The pipeline flows on

While we wait for the new grant funding to come in, we are not sitting on our haunches. Our "pilot phase" is nearing completion. Two more sets of evaluations have been posted on our Pubpub.

1. “Banning wildlife trade can boost demand for unregulated threatened species”

2. "The Governance Of Non-Profits And Their Social Impact: Evidence From A Randomized Program In Healthcare In DRC”

With three more evaluations already in progress, this will yield a total of 10 evaluated papers. Once these are completed, we will decide, announce, and award the recipients for the Impactful Research Prize and the prizes for evaluators, and organize online presentations/discussions (maybe linked to an "award ceremony"?).

Contracting, hiring, expansion

No official announcements yet. However, we expect to be hiring (on a part-time contract basis) soon. This may include roles for:

• Researchers/meta-scientists: to help find and characterize research to be evaluated, identify and communicate with expert evaluators, and synthesize our "evaluation output"

• Communications specialists

• Administrative and Operations personnel

• Tech support/software developers

Here's a brief and rough description of these roles. And here’s a quick form to indicate your potential interest and link your CV/webpage.

You can also/alternately register your interest in doing (paid) research evaluation work for The Unjournal, and/or in being part of our advisory board, here.

We also plan to expand our Management Committee; please reach out if you are interested or can recommend suitable candidates.

Tech and initiatives

We are committed to enhancing our platforms as well as our evaluation and communication templates. We're also exploring strategies to nurture more beneficial evaluations and predictions, potentially in tandem with replication initiatives. A small win: our Mailchimp signup should now be working, and this update should be automatically integrated.

Welcoming new team members

We are delighted to welcome Jordan Dworkin (FAS) and Nicholas Treich (INRA/TSE) to our Advisory Board, and Anirudh Tagat (Monk Prayogshala) to our Management Committee!

• Dworkin's work centers on "improving scientific research, funding, institutions, and incentive structures through experimentation."

• Treich's current research agenda largely focuses on the intersection of animal welfare and economics.

• Tagat investigates economic decision-making in the Indian context, measuring the social and economic impact of the internet and technology, and a range of other topics in applied economics and behavioral science. He is also an active participant in the COS SCORE project.

Update on recent progress: 6 May 2023

Grant funding from the Survival and Flourishing Fund

The Unjournal was recommended/approved for a substantial grant through the 'S-Process' of the Survival and Flourishing Fund. More details and plans to come. This grant will help enable The Unjournal to expand, innovate, and professionalize. We aim to build the awareness, credibility, scale, and scope of The Unjournal, and the communication, benchmarking, and useful outputs of our work. We want to have a substantial impact, building towards our mission and goals...

To make rigorous research more impactful, and impactful research more rigorous. To foster substantial, credible public evaluation and rating of impactful research, driving change in research in academia and beyond, and informing and influencing policy and philanthropic decisions.

Innovations: We are considering other initiatives and refinements (1) to our evaluation ratings, metrics, and predictions, and how these are aggregated, (2) to foster open science and robustness-replication, and (3) to provide inputs to evidence-based policy decision-making under uncertainty. Stay tuned, and please join the conversation.

Opportunities: We plan to expand our management and advisory board, increase incentives for evaluators and authors, and build our pool of evaluators and participating authors and institutions. Our previous call-to-action (see HERE) is still relevant if you want to sign up to be part of our evaluation (referee) pool, submit your work for evaluation, etc. (We are likely to put out a further call soon, but all responses will be integrated.)

Evaluation 'output'

We have published a total of 12 evaluations and ratings of five papers and projects, as well as three author responses. Four can be found on our PubPub page (most concise list here), and one on our Sciety page here (we aim to mirror all content on both pages). All the PubPub content has a DOI, and we are working to get these indexed on Google Scholar and beyond.

The two most recently released evaluations (of Haushofer et al, 2020; and Barker et al, 2022) both surround "Is CBT effective for poor households?" [link: EA Forum post]

Both papers consider randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for low-income households in two African countries (Kenya and Ghana). These papers come to very different conclusions as to the efficacy of this intervention.

See the evaluation summaries and ratings, with linked evaluations HERE (Haushofer et al) and HERE (Barker et al).

Update on recent progress: 22 April 2023

New 'output'

We are now up to twelve total evaluations of five papers. Most of these are on our PubPub page (we are currently aiming to have all of the work hosted both at PubPub and on Sciety, and gaining DOIs and entering the bibliometric ecosystem). The latest two are on an interesting theme, as noted in a recent EA Forum Post:

Two more Unjournal Evaluation sets are out. Both papers consider randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for low-income households in two African countries (Kenya and Ghana). These papers come to very different conclusions as to the efficacy of this intervention.

These are part of Unjournal's 'direct NBER evaluation' stream.

More evaluations coming out soon on themes including global health and development, the environment, governance, and social media.

Animal welfare

To round out our initial pilot: We're particularly looking to evaluate papers and projects relevant to animal welfare and animal agriculture. Please reach out if you have suggestions.

New features of this GitBook: GPT-powered 'chat' Q&A

You can now 'chat' with this page, ask questions, and get answers with links to other parts of the page. To try it out, go to "Search" and choose "Lens."

Update on recent progress: 17 Mar 2023

See our latest post on the EA Forum

1. Our new platform (unjournal.pubpub.org), enabling DOIs and CrossRef (bibliometrics)

2. Evaluations of "Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth"; "self-correcting science"

3. More evaluations soon

4. We are pursuing collaborations with replication and robustness initiatives such as the "Institute for Replication" and repliCATS

5. We are now 'fiscally sponsored' by the Open Collective Foundation; see our page HERE. (Note, this is an administrative thing, it's not a source of funding)

Update on recent progress: 19 Feb 2023

Content and 'publishing'

1. Our Sciety Group is up...

2. With our first posted evaluation ("Long Term Cost-Effectiveness of Resilient Foods"... Denkenberger et al. Evaluations from Scott Janzwood, Anca Hanea, and Alex Bates, and an author response.

3. Two more evaluations 'will be posted soon' (waiting for final author responses.

Tip of the Spear ... right now we are:

• Working on getting six further papers (projects) evaluated, most of which are part of our NBER"Direct evaluation" track

• Developing and discussing tools for aggregating and presenting the evaluators' quantitative judgments

• Building our platforms, and considering ways to better format and integrate evaluations

  • with the original research (e.g., through Hypothes.is collaborative annotation)

  • into the bibliometric record (through DOI's etc)

  • and with each other.

Funding, plans, collaborations

We are seeking grant funding for our continued operation and expansion (see grants and proposals below). We're appealing to funders interested in Open Science and in impactful research.

We're considering collaborations with other compatible initiatives, including...

• replication/reproducibility/robustness-checking initiatives,

• prediction and replication markets,

• and projects involving the elicitation and 'aggregation of expert and stakeholder beliefs' (about both replication and outcomes themselves).

Management and administration, deadlines

• We are now under the Open Collective Foundation 'fiscal sponsorship' (this does not entail funding, only a legal and administrative home). We are postponing the deadline for judging the Impactful Research Prize and the prizes for evaluators. Submission of papers and the processing of these has been somewhat slower than expected.

Other news and media

• EA Forum: "Unjournal's 1st eval is up: Resilient foods paper (Denkenberger et al) & AMA": recent post and AMA (answering questions about the Unjournal's progress, plans, and relation to effective-altruism-relevant research

• March 9-10: David Reinstein will present at the COS Unconference, session on "Translating Open Science Best Practices to Non-academic Settings". See agenda. David will discuss The Unjournal for part of this session.

Calls to action

See: How to get involved. These are basically still all relevant.

1. Evaluators: We have a strong pool of evaluators.

Recall, we pay at least $250 per evaluation, we typically pay more in net ($350), and we are looking to increase this compensation further. Please fill out THIS FORM (about 3-5 min) if you are interested

1. Research to evaluate/prizes: We continue to be interested in submitted and suggested work. One area we would like to engage with more: quantitative social science and economics work relevant to animal welfare.

Hope these updates are helpful. Let me know if you have suggestions.

In a nutshell

The Unjournal seeks to make rigorous research more impactful and impactful research more rigorous. We are a team of researchers, practitioners, and open science advocates led by David Reinstein.

The Unjournal encourages better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings. We coordinate and fund public journal-independent expert evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically presented projects. We publish evaluations, ratings, manager summaries, author responses, and links to evaluated research on our PubPub page.

As the name suggests, we are not a journal!

We work independently of traditional academic journals. We're building an open platform and a sustainable system for feedback, ratings, and assessment. We're currently focusing on quantitative work that informs global priorities in economics, social science, and policy.

How to get involved?

We're looking for research to evaluate, as well as evaluators. You can submit your own research here, or suggest research using this form. We offer financial prizes for suggesting research we end up evaluating. If you want to be an evaluator, apply here. You can use the same form to express your interest in joining our management team, advisory board, or reviewer pool. For more information, see our how to get involved guide.

Why The Unjournal? Peer review is great, but conventional academic publication processes are wasteful, slow, and rent-extracting. They discourage innovation and prompt researchers to focus more on "gaming the system" than on the quality of their research. We will provide an immediate alternative, and at the same time, offer a bridge to a more efficient, informative, useful, and transparent research evaluation system.

Does The Unjournal charge any fees?

No. We're a US-registered tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we don't charge fees for anything. We compensate evaluators for their time and we even award prizes for strong research and evaluation work, in contrast to most traditional journals. We do so thanks to funding from the Long-Term Future Fund and Survival and Flourishing Fund.

At some point in the future, we might consider sliding-scale fees for people or organizations submitting their work for Unjournal evaluation, or for other services. If we do this, it would simply be a way to cover the compensation we pay evaluators and to cover our actual costs. Again, we are a nonprofit and we will stay that way.

How do we do this?

1. Research submission/identification and selection: We identify, solicit, and select relevant research work to be hosted on any open platform in any format that can gain a time-stamped DOI. Authors are encouraged to present their work in the ways they find most comprehensive and understandable. We support the use of dynamic documents and other formats that foster replicability and open science. (See: the benefits of dynamic docs).

2. Paid evaluators (AKA "reviewers"): We compensate evaluators (essentially, reviewers) for providing thorough feedback on this work. (Read more: Why do we pay?)

3. Eliciting quantifiable and comparable metrics: We aim to establish and generate credible measures of research quality and usefulness. We benchmark these against traditional previous measures (such as journal tiers) and assess the reliability, consistency, and predictive power of these measures. (Read more: Why quantitative metrics?)

4. Public evaluation: We publish the evaluation packages (including reports, ratings, author responses, and manager summaries) on our PubPub community. Making evaluation public facilitates dialogue, and supports transparency, impact, understanding, and research progress.

5. Linking, not publishing: Our process is not "exclusive." Authors can submit their work to a journal (or other evaluation service) at any time. This approach also allows us to benchmark our evaluations against traditional publication outcomes.

6. Prizes: We award financial prizes and hold public events to recognize the most credible, impactful, useful, and insightful research, as well as strong engagement with our evaluation process.

7. Transparency: We aim for maximum transparency in our processes and judgments.

Change is hard: overcoming academic inertia

Academics and funders have complained about this stuff for years and continue to do so every day on social media . . . and we're fairly confident our critiques of the traditional review and publication process will resonate with most readers.

So why haven't academia and the research community been able to move to something new? There is a difficult collective action problem. Individual researchers and universities find it risky to move unilaterally. But we believe we have a good chance of finally changing this model and moving to a better equilibrium. How? We will:

• Take risks: Many members of The Unjournal management are not traditional academics; we can stick our necks out. We are also recruiting established senior academics who are less professionally vulnerable.

• Bring in new interests, external funding, and incentives: There are a range of well-funded and powerful organizations—such as the Sloan Foundation and Open Philanthropy—with a strong inherent interest in high-impact research being reliable, robust, and reasoning-transparent. This support can fundamentally shift existing incentive structures.

• Allow less risky "bridging steps": As noted above, The Unjournal allows researchers to submit their work to traditional journals. In fact, this will provide a benchmark to help build our quantitative ratings and demonstrate their value.

• Communicate with researchers and stakeholders to make our processes easy, clear, and useful to them.

• Make our output useful, in the meantime: It may take years for university departments and grant funders to incorporate journal-independent evaluations as part of their metrics and reward systems. The Unjournal can be somewhat patient: our evaluation, rating, feedback, and communication are already providing a valuable service to authors, policymakers, and other researchers.

• Leverage new technology: A new set of open-access and AI-powered tools makes what we are trying to do easier, and makes formats other than static PDFs more useful every day.

• Reward early adopters with prizes and recognition: We can replace "fear of standing out" with "fear of missing out." In particular, authors and research institutions that commit to publicly engaging with evaluations and critiques of their work should be commended and rewarded. And we are doing this.

Our objectives

This GitBook is a knowledge base that supplements our main public page, unjournal.org. It serves as a platform to organize our ideas and resources and track our progress towards our dual objectives:

1. Making "peer evaluation and rating" of open projects into a standard high-status outcome in academia and research, specifically within economics and social sciences. This stands in contrast to the conventional binary choice of accepting or rejecting papers to be published as PDFs and other static formats.

2. Building a cohesive and efficient system for publishing, accruing credibility, and eliciting feedback for research aligned with effective altruism and global priorities. Our ultimate aim is to make rigorous research more impactful, and impactful research more rigorous.

Where do I find...? Where do I go next?

See Content overview

In brief

(see our ) wants your involvement, help, and feedback. We offer rewards and strive to compensate people for their time and effort.

1. Join our team: Complete (about 3–5 min) to apply for our...

   1. Evaluator pool: to be eligible to be commissioned and paid to evaluate and rate research, mainly in quantitative social science and policy

   2. Field specialist teams: help identify, prioritize, and manage research evaluation in a particular field or cause area. A related lower-commitment role: help suggest, prioritize, and discuss research>

   3. Management team or advisory board, to be part of our decision-making

2. Suggest research for us to assess using . We offer bounty rewards. Submit your own research , or by contacting

3. Do an Independent Evaluation to build your portfolio, receive guidance, and be eligible for promotion and prizes. See details

4. Suggest for us to focus on

Give us feedback: Is anything unclear? What could be improved? Email contact@unjournal.org. We will offer rewards for the most useful suggestions.

Overview and call

is the founder and co-director of The Unjournal. The organization is currently looking for field specialists and evaluators, as well as suggestions for relevant work for The Unjournal to evaluate.

The Unjournal is building a system for credible, public, journal-independent feedback and evaluation of research.

We maintain an open call for participants for several different roles:

1. (involving honorariums for time spent)

2. members (no time commitment)

3. (who will often also be on the Advisory Board)

4. (low commitment)

5. A pool of Evaluators (who will be paid for their time and their work; we also draw evaluators from outside this pool)

You can express your interest (and enter our database) .

Evaluators

We will reach out to evaluators (a.k.a. "reviewers") on a case-by-case basis, appropriate for each paper or project being assessed. This is dependent on expertise, the researcher's interest, and a lack of conflict of interest.

Time commitment: Case-by-case basis. For each evaluation, for the amount of time to spend.

Compensation: We pay a minimum of $200 (updated Aug. 2024) for a prompt and complete evaluation, $400 for experienced evaluators. We offer additional prizes and incentives, and are committed to an average compensation of at least $450 per evaluator. .

Who we are looking for: We are putting together a list of people interested in being an evaluator and doing paid referee work for The Unjournal. We generally prioritize the pool of evaluators who signed up for our database before reaching out more widely.

Interested? Please fill out (about 3–5 min, same form for all roles or involvement).

Projects and papers

We are looking for high-quality, globally pivotal research projects to evaluate, particularly those embodying open science practices and innovative formats. We are putting out a call for relevant research. Please suggest research . (We offer bounties and prizes for useful suggestions – see note.) For details of what we are looking for, and some potential examples, and accompanying links.

You can also put .

Contact us

If you are interested in discussing any of the above in person, please email us () to arrange a conversation.

Note: This is under continual refinement; see our for more details.

Some key sections and subsections

Learn more about The Unjournal, our goals and policies

For authors, evaluators, etc.

Writeups of the main points for a few different audiences

Important benefits of journal-independent public evaluation and The Unjournal's approach, with links to deeper commentary

How we choose papers/projects to evaluate, how we assign evaluators, and so on

Other resources and reading

Groups we work with; comparing approaches

What research are we talking about? What will we cover?

Detail, progress, and internal planning

These are of more interest to people within our team; we are sharing these in the spirit of transparency.

A "best feasible plan" for going forward

Successful proposals (ACX, SFF), other applications, initiatives

Key resources and links for managers, advisory board members, staff, team members and others involved with The Unjournal project.

Note: we have moved some of this "internal interest content" over to our Coda.io knowledge base.

Submit your work to be eligible for our “Unjournal: Impactful Research Prize” and a range of other benefits including the opportunity for credible public evaluation and feedback.

First-prize winners will be awarded $2500, and the runner-ups will receive $1000.

Note: these are the minimum amounts; we will increase these if funding permits.

Prize winners will have the opportunity (but not the obligation) to present their work at an online seminar and prize ceremony co-hosted by The Unjournal, , and

The Unjournal, with funding from the and the , organizes and funds public-journal-independent feedback and evaluation. We focus on research that is highly relevant to global priorities, especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation, and aim to expand this widely. We encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.

We aim to publicly evaluate 15 papers (or projects) within our pilot year. This award will honor researchers doing robust, credible, transparent work with a global impact. We especially encourage the submission of research in "open" formats such as hosted dynamic documents (Quarto, R-markdown, Jupyter notebooks, etc.).

The research will be chosen by our management team for public evaluation by 2–3 carefully selected, paid reviewers based on an initial assessment of a paper's methodological strength, openness, clarity, relevance to , and the usefulness of further evaluation and public discussion. We sketch out .

All evaluations, including quantitative ratings, will be made public by default; however, we will consider "embargos" on this for researchers with sensitive career concerns (the linked form asks about this). Note that submitting your work to The Unjournal does not imply "publishing" it: you can submit it to any journal before, during, or after this process.

If we choose not to send your work out to reviewers, we will try to at least offer some brief private feedback (please on this).

All work evaluated by The Unjournal will be eligible for the prize. Engagement with The Unjournal, including responding to evaluator comments, will be a factor in determining the prize winners. We also have a slight preference for giving at least one of the awards to an early-career researcher, but this need not be determinative.

Our management team and advisory board will vote on the prize winners in light of the evaluations, with possible consultation of further external expertise.

Deadline: Extended until 5 December (to ensure eligibility).

Note: In a subsection below, , we outline the basic requirements for submissions to The Unjournal.

How we chose the research prize winners (2023)

The prize winners for The Unjournal's Impactful Research Prize were selected through a multi-step, collaborative process involving both the management team and the advisory board. The selection was guided by several criteria, including the quality and credibility of the research, its potential for real-world impact, and the authors' engagement with The Unjournal's evaluation process.

1. Initial Evaluation: All papers that were evaluated by The Unjournal were eligible for the prize. The discussion, evaluations, and ratings provided by external evaluators played a significant role in the initial shortlisting.

2. Management and Advisory Board Input: Members of the management committee and advisory board were encouraged to write brief statements about papers they found particularly prize-worthy.

3. Meeting and Consensus: A "prize committee" meeting was held with four volunteers from the management committee to discuss the shortlisted papers and reach a consensus. The committee considered both the papers and the content of the evaluations in detail. Members of the committee allocated a total of 100 points among the 10 paper candidates. We used this to narrow down a shortlist of five papers.

4. Point Voting: The above shortlist and the notes from the accompanying discussion were shared with all management committee and advisory board members. Everyone in this larger group was invited to allocate up to 100 points among the shortlisted papers (and asked to allocate fewer points if they were less familiar with the papers and evaluations).

5. Special Considerations: We decided that at least one of the winners had to be a paper submitted by the authors or one where the authors substantially engaged with The Unjournal's processes. However, this constraint did not prove binding. Early-career researchers were given a slight advantage in our consideration.

6. Final Selection: The first and second prizes were given to the papers with the first- and second-most points, respectively.

This comprehensive approach aimed to ensure that the prize winners were selected in a manner that was rigorous, fair, and transparent, reflecting the values and goals of The Unjournal.

In addition to the "work roles," we are looking to engage researchers, research users, meta-scientists, and people with experience in open science, open access, and management of initiatives similar to The Unjournal.

We are continually looking to enrich our general team and board, including our Management committee members, Organizational roles and responsibilities These roles come with some compensation and incentives.

(Please see links and consider submitting an expression of interest).

Proposed projects

We are planning to hire 3–7 researchers for a one-off paid project.

There are two opportunities: Contracted Research (CR) and Independent Projects (IP).

Project Outline

• What specific research themes in economics, policy, and social science are most important for global priorities?

• What projects and papers are most in need of further in-depth public evaluation, attention, and scrutiny?

• Where does "Unjournal-style evaluation" have the potential to be one of the most impactful uses of time and money? By impactful, we mean in terms of some global conception of value (e.g., the well-being of living things, the survival of human values, etc.).

This is an initiative that aims to identify, summarize, and conduct an in-depth evaluation of the most impactful themes in economics, policy, and social science to answer the above questions. Through a systematic review of selected papers and potential follow-up with authors and evaluators, this project will enhance the visibility, understanding, and scrutiny of high-value research, fostering both rigorous and impactful scholarship.

Contracted Research (CR) This is the main opportunity, a unique chance to contribute to the identification and in-depth evaluation of impactful research themes in economics, policy, and social science. We’re looking for researchers and research users who can commit a (once-off) 15–20 hours. CR candidates will:

• Summarize a research area or theme, its status, and why it may be relevant to global priorities (~4 hours).

  • We are looking for fairly narrow themes. Examples might include:

    • The impact of mental health therapy on well-being in low-income countries.

    • The impact of cage-free egg regulation on animal welfare.

    • Public attitudes towards AI safety regulation.

• Identify a selection of papers in this area that might be high-value for UJ evaluation (~3 hours).

  • Choose at least four of these from among NBER/"top-10 working paper" series (or from work submitted to the UJ – we can share – or from work where the author has expressed interest to you).

• For a single paper, or a small set of these papers (or projects) (~6 hours)

  • Read the paper fairly carefully and summarize it, explaining why it is particularly relevant.

  • Discuss one or more aspects of the paper that need further scrutiny or evaluation.

  • Identify 3 possible evaluators, and explain why they might be particularly relevant to evaluate this work. (Give a few sentences we could use in an email to these evaluators).

  • Possible follow-up task: email and correspond with the authors and evaluators (~3 hours).

We will compensate you for your time at a rate reflecting your experience and skills ($25–$65/hour). This work also has the potential to serve as a “work sample” for future roles at The Unjournal, as it is highly representative of what our How to get involved andEvaluators are commissioned to do.

We are likely to follow up on your evaluation suggestions. We also may incorporate your writing into our web page and public posts; you can choose whether you want to be publicly acknowledged or remain anonymous.

Independent Projects (IP)

We are also inviting applications to do similar work as an “Independent Project” (IP), a parallel opportunity designed for those eager to engage but not interested in working under a contract, or not meeting some of the specific criteria for the Contracted Research role. This involves similar work to above.

If you are accepted to do an IP, we will offer some mentoring and feedback. We will also offer prize rewards/bounties for particularly strong IP work. We will also consider working with professors and academic supervisors on these IP projects, as part of university assignments and dissertations.

You can apply to the CR and IP positions together; we will automatically consider you for each.

Get Involved!

If you are interested in involvement in either the CR or IP side of this project, please let us know through our survey form here.

These are principally not research roles, but familiarity with research and research environments will be helpful, and there is room for research involvement depending on the candidate’s interest, background, and skills/aptitudes.

There are currently one such role:

Communications, Writing, and Public Relations Specialist (As of November 2023, still seeking freelancers)

Further note: We previously considered a “Management support and administrative professional” role. We are not planning to hire for this role currently. Those who indicated interest will be considered for other roles.

Express interest here.

Communications, Writing, and Public Relations Specialist

As of November 2023, we are soliciting applications for freelancers with skills in particular areas

The Unjournal is looking to work with a proficient writer who is adept at communicating with academics and researchers (particularly in economics, social science, and policy), journalists, policymakers, and philanthropists. As we are in our early stages, this is a generalist role. We need someone to help us explain what The Unjournal does and why, make our processes easy to understand, and ensure our outputs (evaluations and research synthesis) are accessible and useful to non-specialists. We seek someone who values honesty and accuracy in communication; someone who has a talent for simplifying complex ideas and presenting them in a clear and engaging way.

The work is likely to include:

1. Promotion and general explanation

   • Spread the word about The Unjournal, our approach, our processes, and our progress in press releases and short pieces, as well as high-value emails and explanations for a range of audiences

   • Make the case for The Unjournal to potentially skeptical audiences in academia/research, policy, philanthropy, effective altruism, and beyond

2. Keeping track of our progress and keeping everyone in the loop

   • Help produce and manage our external (and some internal) long-form communications

   • Help produce and refine explanations, arguments, and responses

   • Help provide reports to relevant stakeholders and communities

3. Making our rules and processes clear to the people we work with

   • Explain our procedures and policies for research submission, evaluation, and synthesis; make our systems easy to understand

   • Help us build flexible communications templates for working with research evaluators, authors, and others

4. Other communications, presentations, and dissemination

   • Write and organize content for grants applications, partnership requests, advertising, hiring, and more

   • Potentially: compose non-technical write-ups of Unjournal evaluation synthesis content (in line with interest and ability)

Most relevant skills, aptitudes, interests, experience, and background knowledge:

• Understanding of The Unjournal project

• Strong written communications skills across a relevant range of contexts, styles, tones, and platforms (journalistic, technical, academic, informal, etc.)

• Familiarity with academia and research processes and institutions

• Familiarity with current conversations and research on global priorities within government and policy circles, effective altruism, and relevant academic fields

• Willingness to learn and use IT, project management, data management, web design, and text-parsing tools (such as those mentioned below), with the aid of GPT/AI chat

Further desirable skills and experience:

• Academic/research background in areas related to The Unjournal’s work

• Operations, administrative, and project management experience

• Experience working in a small nonprofit institution

• Experience with promotion and PR campaigns and working with journalists and bloggers

Proposed terms:

• Project-based contract "freelance" work

• $30–$55/hour USD (TBD, depending on experience and capabilities). Hours for each project include some onboarding and upskilling time.

• Our current budget can cover roughly 200 hours of this project work. We hope to increase and extend this (depending on our future funding and expenses).

• This role is contract-based and supports remote and international applicants. We can contract people living in most countries, but we cannot serve as an immigration sponsor.

Express your interest here.

I (David Reinstein) am an economist who left UK academia after 15 years to pursue a range of projects (see my web page). One of these is The Unjournal:

The Unjournal (with funding from the Long Term Future Fund and the Survival and Flourishing Fund) organizes and funds public-journal-independent feedback and evaluation, paying reviewers for their work. We focus on research that is highly relevant to global priorities, especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation. We encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.

Evaluators

We want researchers who are interested in doing evaluation work for The Unjournal. We pay an average of $400-$500 per complete and on-time evaluation, and we award monetary prizes for the strongest work. Right now we are particularly looking for economists and people with quantitative and policy-evaluation skills. We describe what we are asking evaluators to do here: essentially a regular peer review with some different emphases, plus providing a set of quantitative ratings and predictions. Your evaluation content would be made public (and receive a DOI, etc.), but you can choose if you want to remain anonymous or not.

To sign up to be part of the pool of evaluators or to get involved in The Unjournal project in other ways, please fill out this brief form or email contact@unjournal.org.

Research

We welcome suggestions for particularly impactful research that would benefit from (further) public evaluation. We choose research for public evaluation based on an initial assessment of methodological strength, openness, clarity, relevance to global priorities, and the usefulness of further evaluation and public discussion. We sketch these criteria here, and discuss some potential examples here (see research we have chosen and evaluated at unjournal.pubpub.org, and a larger list of research we're considering here).

If you have research—your own or others—that you would like us to assess, please fill out this form. You can submit your own work here (or by contacting ). Authors of evaluated papers will be eligible for our Impactful Research Prizes (details).

Feedback

We are looking for both feedback on and involvement in The Unjournal project. Feel free to reach out at .

View our data protection statement

Management committee members

Activities of those on the management committee may involve a combination of the following (although you can choose your focus):

• Contributing to the decision-making process regarding research focus, reviewer assignment, and prize distribution.

• Collaborating with other committee members on the establishment of rules and guidelines, such as determining the metrics for research evaluation and defining the mode of assessment publication.

• Helping plan The Unjournal’s future path.

• Helping monitor and prioritize research for The Unjournal to evaluate (i.e., acting as a field specialist; see further discussion below). Acting as an evaluation manager for research in your area.

Time commitment: A minimum of 15–20 hours per year.

Compensation: We have funding for a $57.50 per hour honorarium for the first 20 hours, with possible compensation for additional work. Evaluation management work will be further compensated (at roughly $300–$450 per paper).

Who we are looking for: All applicants are welcome. We are especially interested in those involved in global priorities research (and related fields), policy research and practice, open science and meta-science, bibliometrics and scholarly publishing, and any other academic research. We want individuals with a solid interest in The Unjournal project and its goals, and the ability to meet the minimal time commitment. Applying is extremely quick, and those not chosen will be considered for other roles and work going forward.

Advisory board (AB) members

Beyond direct roles within The Unjournal, we're building a larger, more passive advisory board to be part of our network, to offer occasional feedback and guidance. There is essentially no minimum time commitment for advisory board members—only opportunities to engage. We sketch some of the expectations in the fold below.

Field Specialists and Unjournal Research Affiliates

Goals: Support open evaluation and impactful, credible research, helping The Unjournal keep on top of the latest, most relevant, influential, and globally-consequential work. Help raise awareness of The Unjournal, fostering a transition away from traditional journal peer review towards a more transparent, efficient, and rigorous approach.

What Field Specialists (FS's) and Unjournal Research Affiliates (URAs) do, specifically

Source, prioritize, and suggest research

Focus on a particular area of research, policy, or impactful outcome, in collaboration with other members of our area-focused teams.

Keep track of new or under-considered research with potential for impact and explain and assess the extent to which The Unjournal can add value by commissioning its evaluation. Provide a brief explanation of why each paper matters and how it aligns with The Unjournal’s approach.

Scope: Perhaps three papers per academic term; FS are encouraged to suggest more. This comes with compensation and incentives

Help track and curate this list of prioritized research, considering and discussing specific areas and issues that merit evaluation. We maintain a public database of research of potential interest here.

Prioritize research submitted by authors or suggested by other team members

Write and share "second opinion" assessments of this research, considering the importance and relevance for our evaluation. Vote on a short list of papers in your area to determine whether we should commission these for evaluation. Attend (very occassional) 'field group meetings' to discuss this.

Evaluation management (FS)

Field Specialists may serve as 'evaluation managers' (with additional compensation). Evaluation managers help us identify and commission evaluators for work we have prioritized, help manage this evaluation process, and write a summary report on the evaluations

Represent The Unjournal

Understand our mission and be ready to explain it to colleagues and (optionally) on social media.

Benefits of being a Field Specialist or URA

• Public Leadership: It publicly signals your commitment to open science principles, innovation, and research impact.

• Professional Credibility & Recognition: URAs are chosen through a selective process, and will be publicly acknowledged. URAs gain valuable experience, strengthen their CV, and position themselves for potential future opportunities with The Unjournal (e.g., Field Specialist or management roles).

• Networking & Community: Build contacts with others in your field and with related interests. Stay on top of cutting-edge research, discuss and understand its value and connection to the field and to policy/impact.

• Influencing the Agenda: URAs help shape what research The Unjournal evaluates and promotes, furthering our mission of global impact, and advocating for your own priorities.

• Compensation: Incentive pay for recommending and evaluating papers. Be compensated ($) for research surveying and scoping you may are already be doing. See compensation details here.

Field Specialists: specifics and norms

See the Norms and Compensation page.

Time commitment: There is no specific time obligation—only opportunities to engage. We may also consult you occasionally on your areas of expertise. Perhaps 1–4 hours a month is a reasonable starting expectation for people already involved in doing or using research, plus potential additional paid assignments. Our Incentives and norms document also provides some guidance on the nature of work and the time involved.

Compensation: We aim to fairly compensate people for time spent on work done to support The Unjournal, and to provide incentives for suggesting and helping to prioritize research for evaluation. See the Norms and Compensation page. Evaluation management work will be compensated at roughly $300–$450 per project.

Who we are looking for: For the FS roles, we are seeking active researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders with a strong publication record and/or involvement in the research and/or research-linked policy and prioritization processes. For the AB, also people with connections to academic, governmental, or relevant non-profit institutions, and/or involvement in open science, publication, and research evaluation processes. People who can offer relevant advice, experience, guidance, or help communicate our goals, processes, and progress.

Interested? Please fill out this form (about 3–5 min, using the same form for all roles).

Unjournal Research Affiliates: specifics and norms

Application criteria: Applicants will selected based on (1) their ability to assess, discuss, and communicate the global impact of research, (2) their understanding of The Unjournal approach, (3) their research skills, interests, and experience.

Low Time Commitment: This role is designed to fit into a busy academic or research schedule. You’ll stay involved at a comfortable level without overextending your commitments.

Compensation This role comes with no baseline compensation, but URAs are eligible for incentive compensation for suggesting papers, for doing high-value assessment for prioritization, and more (see here).

Expectations for URAs

1. Recommend 2–3 papers each academic term that you think have the potential to make a substantial impact. Provide a brief explanation of why each paper matters and how it aligns with The Unjournal’s approach. Earn compensation for your recommendations.

2. Provide Second Opinions & Prioritization: Complete three “second opinion” assessments each term, offering a concise evaluation of a paper’s relevance and importance. Contribute to broader discussions about research prioritization.

3. Vote & Engage: Participate in monthly voting on a short list of papers. Stay semi-active on Slack and Coda (with no strict requirement to check in regularly, beyond voting).

4. Represent The Unjournal: Understand our mission and be ready to explain it to colleagues and on social media. Attend at least one Unjournal meeting (one hour) per year to stay connected.

5. Optional: Consult on evaluation management Occasionally advise on evaluator suggestions for papers in your field (additional compensation may apply).

Apply here for this and other roles.

Self-contained public release: Open Call: Unjournal Research Affiliates (URA)

Contact us

If you are interested in discussing any of the above in person, please email us () to arrange a conversation.

We invite you to fill in this form (the same as that linked above) to leave your contact information and outline which parts of the project interest you.

Note: These descriptions are under continual refinement; see our policies for more details.

The potential roles discussed below combine research-linked work with operations and administrative responsibilities. Overall, this may include some combination of:

• Assisting and guiding the process of identifying strong and potentially impactful work in key areas, explaining its relevance, its strengths, and areas warranting particular evaluation and scrutiny

• Interacting with authors, recruiting, and overseeing evaluators

• Synthesizing and disseminating the results of evaluations and ratings

• Aggregating and benchmarking these results

• Helping build and improve our tools, incentives, and processes

• Curating outputs relevant to other researchers and policymakers

• Doing "meta-science" work

Possible role: Research and Evaluation Specialist (RES)

. (Nov. 2023: Note, we can not guarantee that we will be hiring for this role, because of changes in our approach.)

Note on other versions of this content.

Initiative: ‘independent evaluations’

is seeking academics, researchers, and students to submit structured evaluations of the most impactful research emerging in the social sciences. Strong evaluations will be posted or linked on our , offering readers a perspective on the implications, strengths, and limitations of the research. These evaluations can be submitted using for academic-targeted research or for more applied work; evaluators can publish their name or maintain anonymity; we also welcome collaborative evaluation work. We will facilitate, promote, and encourage these evaluations in several ways, described below.

Who should do these evaluations?

We are particularly looking for people with research training, experience, and expertise in quantitative social science and statistics including cost-benefit modeling and impact evaluation. This could include professors, other academic faculty, postdocs, researchers outside of academia, quantitative consultants and modelers, PhD students, and students aiming towards PhD-level work (pre-docs, research MSc students etc.) But anyone is welcome to give this a try — when in doubt, piease go for it.

We are also happy to support collaborations and group evaluations. There is a good track record for this — see: “”, ASAPBio’s, and for examples in this vein. We may also host live events and/or facilitate asynchronous collaboration on evaluations

Instructors/PhD, MRes, Predoc programs: We are also keen to work with students and professors to integrate ‘independent evaluation assignments’ (aka ‘learn to do peer reviews’) into research training.

Why should you do an evaluation?

Your work will support The Unjournal’s core mission — improving impactful research through journal-independent public evaluation. In addition, you’ll help research users (policymakers, funders, NGOs, fellow researchers) by providing high quality detailed evaluations that rate and discuss the strengths, limitations, and implications of research.

Doing an independent evaluation can also help you. We aim to provide feedback to help you become a better researcher and reviewer. We’ll also give prizes for the strongest evaluations. Lastly, writing evaluations will help you build a portfolio with The Unjournal, making it more likely we will commission you for paid evaluation work in the future.

Which research?

We focus on rigorous, globally-impactful research in quantitative social science and policy-relevant research. (See for details.) We’re especially eager to receive independent evaluations of:

1. Research we publicly prioritize: see our we've prioritized or evaluated. (Also...)

2. Research we previously evaluated (see , as well as )

3. Work that other people and organizations suggest as having high potential for impact/value of information (also see)

You can also suggest research yourself and then do an independent evaluation of it.

What sort of ‘evaluations’ and what formats?

We’re looking for careful methodological/technical evaluations that focus on research credibility, impact, and usefulness. We want evaluators to dig into the weeds, particularly in areas where they have aptitude and expertise. See our.

The Unjournal’s structured evaluation forms: We encourage evaluators to do these using either:

1. Our : If you are evaluating research aimed at an academic journal or

2. Our : If you are evaluating research that is probably not aimed at an academic journal. This may include somewhat less technical work, such as reports from policy organizations and think tanks, or impact assessments and cost-benefit analyses

Other public evaluation platforms: We are also open to engaging with evaluations done on existing public evaluation platforms such as. Evaluators: If you prefer to use another platform, please let us know about your evaluation using one of the forms above. If you like, you can leave most of our fields blank, and provide a link to your evaluation on the other public platform.

Academic (~PhD) assignments and projects: We are also looking to build ties with research-intensive university programs; we can help you structure academic assignments and provide external reinforcement and feedback. Professors, instructors, and PhD students: please contact us ().

How will The Unjournal engage?

1. Posting and signal-boosting

We will encourage all these independent evaluations to be publicly hosted, and will share links to these. We will further promote the strongest independent evaluations, potentially re-hosting them on our platforms (such as )

However, when we host or link these, we will keep them clearly separated and signposted as distinct from the commissioned evaluations; independent evaluations will not be considered official, and their ratings won’t be included in our (see dashboard; see discussion).

2. Offering incentives

Bounties: We will offer prizes for the ‘most valuable independent evaluations’.

As a start, after the first eight quality submissions (or by Jan. 1 2025, whichever comes later), we will award a prize of $500 to the most valuable evaluation.

Further details tbd. As a reference...

All evaluation submissions will be eligible for these prizes and “grandfathered in” to any prizes announced later. We will announce and promote the prize winners (unless they opt for anonymity).

Evaluator pool: People who submit evaluations can elect to join our evaluator pool. We will consider and (time-permitting) internally rate these evaluations. People who do the strongest evaluations in our focal areas are likely to be commissioned as paid evaluators for The Unjournal.

We’re also moving towards a two-tiered base compensation for evaluations. We will offer a higher rate to people who can demonstrate previous strong review/evaluation work. These independent evaluations will count towards this ‘portfolio’.

3. Providing materials, resources and guidance/feedback

Our provides examples of strong work, including the.

We will curate guidelines and learning materials from relevant fields and from applied work and impact-evaluation. For a start, see We plan to build and curate more of this...

4. Partnering with academic institutions

We are reaching out to PhD programs and pre-PhD research-focused programs. Some curricula already involve “mock referee report” assignments. We hope professors will encourage their students to do these through our platform. In return, we’ll offer the incentives and promotion mentioned above, as well as resources, guidance, and some further feedback

5. Fostering a positive environment for anonymous and signed evaluations

We want to preserve a positive and productive environment. This is particularly important because we will be accepting anonymous content. We will take steps to ensure that the system is not abused. If the evaluations have an excessively negative tone, have content that could be perceived as personal attacks, or have clearly spurious criticism, we will ask the evaluators to revise this, or we may decide not to post or link it.

How does this benefit The Unjournal and our mission?

1. Crowdsourced feedback can add value in itself; encouraging this can enable some public evaluation and discussion of work that The Unjournal doesn’t have the bandwidth to cover

2. Improving our evaluator pool and evaluation standards in general.

   1. Students and ECRs can practice and (if possible) get feedback on independent evaluations

   2. They can demonstrate their ability this publicly, enabling us to recruit and commission the strongest evaluators

3. Examples will help us build guidelines, resources, and insights into ‘what makes an evaluation useful’.

4. This provides us opportunities to engage with academia, especially in Ph.D programs and research-focused instruction.

About The Unjournal (unfold)

commissions public evaluations of impactful research in quantitative social sciences fields. We are an alternative and a supplement to traditional academic peer-reviewed journals – separating evaluation from journals unlocks a . We ask expert evaluators to write detailed, constructive, critical reports. We also solicit a set of structured ratings focused on research credibility, methodology, careful and calibrated presentation of evidence, reasoning transparency, replicability, relevance to global priorities, and usefulness for practitioners (including funders, project directors, and policymakers who rely on this research). While we have mainly targeted impactful research from academia, our covers impactful work that uses formal quantitative methods but is not aimed at academic journals. So far, we’ve commissioned about 50 evaluations of 24 papers, and published these evaluation packages , linked to academic search engines and bibliometrics.

I was in academia for about 20 years (PhD Economics, UC Berkeley; Lecturer, University of Essex; Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter). I saw how the journal system was broken.

• Academics constantly complain about it (but don't do anything to improve it).

• Most conversations are not about research, but about 'who got into what journal' and 'tricks for getting your paper into journals'

• Open science and replicability are great, and dynamic documents make research a lot more transparent and readable. But these goals and methods are very hard to apply within the traditional journal system and its 'PDF prisons'.

Now I'm working outside academia and can stick my neck out. I have the opportunity to help fix the system. I work with research organizations and large philanthropists involved with effective altruism and global priorities. They care about the results of research in areas that are relevant to global priorities. They want research to be reliable, robust, reasoning-transparent, and well-communicated. Bringing them into the equation can change the game.

See also: Governance of The Unjournal

The Unjournal was founded by David Reinstein , who maintains this wiki/GitBook and other resources.

Management Committee

(Note on terminology)

See description under roles.

• David Reinstein, Founder and Co-director

• Gavin Taylor, Interdisciplinary Researcher at IGDORE; Co-director

• Ryan Briggs, Social Scientist and Associate Professor in the Guelph Institute of Development Studies and Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph, Canada

• Kris Gulati, Economics PhD student at the University of California, Merced

• Hansika Kapoor, Research Author at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala (India)

• Tanya O'Garra, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Environment & Sustainability, Lee Kuan Yew of School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

• Emmanuel Orkoh, Research Scientist (fellow) at North-West University (South Africa)

• Anirudh Tagat, Research Author at the Department of Economics at Monk Prayogshala (India)

• Bob Kubinec, University of South Carolina

Advisory board

See description under roles.

Sam Abbott, Infectious Disease Researcher, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Jonathan Berman, Associate Professor of Marketing, London Business School

Rosie Bettle, Applied Researcher (Global Health & Development) at Founder's Pledge

Gary Charness, Professor of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Daniela Cialfi, Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Quantitative Methods and Economic Theory at the University of Chieti (Italy)

Jordan Dworkin, Metascience Program Lead, Federation of American Scientists

Jake Eaton, Managing Editor at Asterisk Mag: writing and research on global health, development, and nutrition

Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University (New York)

Anca Hanea, Associate Professor, University of Melbourne (Australia): expert judgment, biosciences, applied probability, uncertainty quantification

Alexander Herwix, Late-Stage PhD Student in Information Systems at the University of Cologne, Germany

Conor Hughes, PhD Student, Applied Economics, University of Minnesota

Jana Lasser, Postdoctoral researcher, Institute for Interactive Systems and Data Science at Graz University of Technology (Austria)

Nicolas Treich, Associate Researcher, INRAE, Member, Toulouse School of Economics (France)

Michael Wiebe, Data Scientist, Economist Consultant; PhD University of British Columbia (Economics)

Field Specialists

The table below shows all the members of our team (including field specialists) taking on a research-monitoring role (see here for a description of this role).

Staff, contractors, and consultants

, Research Specialist: Data science, metascience, aggregation of expert judgment

Jordan Pieters, Operations generalist

Kynan Behan, Generalist assistance

Laura Sofia-Castro, Communications (academic research/policy)

Adam Steinberg, Communications and copy-editing

Toby Weed, Communications and consulting

Nesim Sisa, technical software support

Red Bermejo, Mikee Mercado, Jenny Siers – consulting (through Anti-Entropy) on strategy, marketing, and task management tools

We are a member of Knowledge Futures. They are working with us to update PubPub and incorporate new features (editorial management, evaluation tools, etc.) that will be particularly useful to The Unjournal and other members.

Other people and initiatives we are in touch with

See also List of people consulted (in ACX grant proposal).

Related: EA/global priorities seminar series

Plan of action

TLDR: See In a nutshell

Podcasts, presentations, and video

Journal independent evaluation and The Unjournal

EA Anywhere (Youtube) – bridging the gap between EA and academia

• See slide deck (Link: bit.ly/unjourrnalpresent; offers comment access)

• Presentation summarized with time-stamped hyperlinks (+~AI generated content)

ReproducibiliTea podcast

Slide decks

Presentation for EA Anywhere, online event, 5 Nov. 2023 1-2pm ET

(Link: bit.ly/unjourrnalpresent; offers comment access)

"Slaying the journals": Google doc

Earlier discussion document, aimed at EA/global priorities, academic, and open-science audiences [link]

"Moving science beyond ... static journals" ... How EA/nonprofits can help

Moving science beyond closed, binary, static journals; a proposed alternative; how the "Effective Altruist" and nontraditional nonprofit sector can help make this happen

• 2021 A shorter outline posted on onscienceandacademia.org

EA forum posts

Post-pilot goals

See the vision and broad plan presented here (and embedded below), updated August 2023.

Pilot targets

Updated: Partial update 10 Dec 2022.

Building research "unjournal"

See here for proposed specifics.

Setup and team

✔️ Pilot: Building a founding committee

✔️/⏳ Define the broad scope of our research interest and key overriding principles. Light-touch, to also be attractive to aligned academics

⏳ Build "editorial-board-like" teams with subject or area expertise

Status: Mostly completed/decided for pilot phase

Create a set of rules for "submission and management"

• Which projects enter the review system (relevance, minimal quality, stakeholders, any red lines or "musts")

  • ⏳ See here for a first pass.

• How projects are to be submitted

• How reviewers are to be assigned and compensated

Status: Mostly completed/decided for pilot phase; will review after initial trial

Rules for reviews/assessments

• To be done on the chosen open platform (Kotahi/Sciety) unless otherwise infeasible (10 Dec 2022 update)

• Share, advertise, promote this; have efficient meetings and presentations

  • Establish links to all open-access bibliometric initiatives (to the extent feasible)

• Harness and encourage additional tools for quality assessment, considering cross-links to prediction markets/Metaculus, to coin-based 'ResearchHub', etc.

See our guidelines for evaluators.

Status: Mostly completed/decided for pilot phase; will review after the initial trial

Further steps

See our 12-month plan.

Status: We are still working with Google Docs and building an external survey interface. We plan to integrate this with PubPub over the coming months (August/Sept. 2023)

March 25 2024: Workshop: Innovations in Research Evaluation, Replicability, and Impact

Research evaluation is changing: New approaches go beyond the traditional journal model, promoting transparency, replicability, open science, open access, and global impact. You can be a part of this.

Join us on March 25 for an interactive workshop, featuring presentations from Macie Daley (Center for Open Science), David Reinstein (The Unjournal), Gary Charness (UC Santa Barbara), and The Unjournal’s Impactful Research Prize and Evaluator Prize winners. Breakout discussions, Q&A, and interactive feedback sessions will consider innovations in open research evaluation, registered revisions, research impact, and open science methods and career opportunities.

The event will be held fully online on Zoom, on March 25 from 9AM- 11:30 AM (EST) and 9:30 PM - Midnight (EST) to accommodate a range of time zones. UTC: 25-March 1pm-3:30pm and 26-March 1:30am-4am. The event is timetabled: feel free to participate in any part you wish.

See the event page here for all details, and to registr.

Jan 2024: Impactful Research and Evaluation Prizes winners announced

Impactful Research Prize Winners

Aug. 30, 2023: "Pilot's done, what has been won (and learned)?"

Pilot = completed!

With the completed set of evaluations of "Do Celebrity Endorsements Matter? A Twitter Experiment Promoting Vaccination in Indonesia" and "The Governance of Non-Profits and Their Social Impact: Evidence from a Randomized Program in Healthcare in DRC,” our pilot is complete:

• 10 research papers evaluated

• 21 evaluations

• 5 author responses

You can see this output most concisely in our PubPub collection here (evaluations are listed as "supplements," at least for the time being).

For a continuously updated overview of our process, including our evaluation metrics, see our "data journalism" notebook hosted here.

Remember, we assign individual DOIs to all of these outputs (evaluation, responses, manager syntheses) and aim to get the evaluation data into all bibliometrics and scholarly databases. So far, Google Scholar has picked up one of our outputs. (The Google Scholar algorithm is a bit opaque—your tips are welcome.)

Following up on the pilot: prizes and seminars

We will make decisions and award our pilot Impactful Research Prize and evaluator prizes soon (aiming for the end of September). The winners will be determined by a consensus of our management team and advisory board (potentially consulting external expertise). The choices will largely be driven by the ratings and predictions given by Unjournal evaluators. After we make the choices, we will make our decision process public and transparent.

Following this, we are considering holding an online workshop (that will include a ceremony for the awarding of prizes). Authors and (non-anonymous) evaluators will be invited to discuss their work and take questions. We may also hold an open discussion and Q&A on The Unjournal and our approach. We aim to partner with other organizations in academia and in the impactful-research and open-science spaces. If this goes well, we may make it the start of a regular thing.

Other planned follow-ups from the pilot

Our pilot yielded a rich set of data and learning-by-doings. We plan to make use of this, including . . .

• synthesizing and reporting on evaluators' and authors' comments on our process; adapting these to make it better;

• analyzing the evaluation metrics for patterns, potential biases, and reliability measures;

• "aggregating expert judgment" from these metrics;

• tracking future outcomes (traditional publications, citations, replications, etc.) to benchmark the metrics against; and

• drawing insights from the evaluation content, and then communicating these (to policymakers, etc.).

The big scale-up

Evaluating more research: prioritization

We continue to develop processes and policies around "which research to prioritize." For example, we are discussing whether we should set targets for different fields, for related outcome "cause categories," and for research sources. We intend to open up this discussion to the public to bring in a range of perspectives, experience, and expertise. We are working towards a grounded framework and a systematic process to make these decisions. See our expanding notes, discussion, and links on "what is global-priorities relevant research?"

We are still inviting applications for the paid standalone project helping us accomplish these frameworks and processes. Our next steps:

1. Building our frameworks and principles for prioritizing research to be evaluated, a coherent approach to implementation, and a process for weighing and reassessing these choices. We will incorporate previous approaches and a range of feedback. For a window into our thinking so far, see our "high-level considerations" and our practical prioritization concerns and goals.

2. Building research-scoping teams of field specialists. These will consider agendas in different fields, subfields, and methods (psychology, RCT-linked development economics, etc.) and for different topics and outcomes (global health, attitudes towards animal welfare, social consequences of AI, etc.) We begin to lay out possible teams and discussions here (the linked discussion spaces are private for now, but we aim to make things public whenever it's feasible). These "field teams" will

   • discuss and report on the state of research in their areas, including where and when relevant research is posted publicly, and in what state;

   • the potential for Unjournal evaluation of this work as well as when and how we should evaluate it, considering potential variations from our basic approach; and

   • how to prioritize work in this area for evaluation, reporting general guidelines and principles, and informing the aforementioned frameworks.

   Most concretely, the field teams will divide up the space of research work to be scoped and prioritized among the members of the teams.

Growing The Unjournal Team

Our previous call for field specialists is still active. We received a lot of great applications and strong interest, and we plan to send out invitations soon. But the door is still open to express interest!

New members of our team: Welcome Rosie Bettle (Founder's Pledge) to our advisory board, as a field specialist.

Improving the evaluation process and metrics

As part of our scale-up (and in conjunction with supporting PubPub on their redesigned platform), we're hoping to improve our evaluation procedure and metrics. We want to make these clearer to evaluators, more reliable and consistent, and more useful and informative to policymakers and other researchers (including meta-analysts).

We don't want to reinvent the wheel (unless we can make it a bit more round). We will be informed by previous work, such as:

• existing research into the research evaluation process, and on expert judgment elicitation and aggregation;

• practices from projects like RepliCATS/IDEAS, PREreview BITSS Open Policy Analysis, the “Four validities” in research design, etc.; and

• metrics used (e.g., "risk of bias") in systematic reviews and meta-analyses as well as databases such as 3ie's Development Evidence Portal.

Of course, our context and goals are somewhat distinct from the initiatives above.

We also aim to consult potential users of our evaluations as to which metrics they would find most helpful.

(A semi-aside: The choice of metrics and emphases could also empower efforts to encourage researchers to report policy-relevant parameters more consistently.)

We aim to bring a range of researchers and practitioners into these questions, as well as engaging in public discussion. Please reach out.

"Spilling tea"

Yes, I was on a podcast, but I still put my trousers on one arm at a time, just like everyone else! Thanks to Will Ngiam for inviting me (David Reinstein) on "ReproducibiliTea" to talk about "Revolutionizing Scientific Publishing" (or maybe "evolutionizing" ... if that's a word?). I think I did a decent job of making the case for The Unjournal, in some detail. Also, listen to find out what to do if you are trapped in a dystopian skating rink! (And find out what this has to do with "advising young academics.")

I hope to do more of this sort of promotion: I'm happy to go on podcasts and other forums and answer questions about The Unjournal, respond to doubts you may have, consider your suggestions and discuss alternative initiatives.

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Progress notes since last update

See also Previous updates

Hope these updates are helpful. Let me know if you have suggestions.