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 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 are working independently of traditional academic journals to build an open platform and a sustainable system for feedback, ratings, and assessment. We are currently focusing on quantitative work that informs global priorities in economics, policy, and other social sciences.

We are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.

We are looking for research papers to evaluate, as well as evaluators. If you want to suggest research you can do so using this form, or this form to submit your own work. If you want to be an evaluator, please apply here. You can express your interest in being a member of the management team, advisory board, or field specialist team in the same link. For more information, check our more detailed guide on how to get involved here.

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.

No. We are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and we do not charge any fees for submitting and evaluating your research. We compensate evaluators for their time and even award prizes for strong research 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.