Academia incentivizes publishing over peer review. That means too many submissions and not enough reviews, or reviews that are late and low quality.
Reciprocal Reviews breaks this cycle:
- Editors set a cost for submissions, priced in review tokens, e.g. ★ 10 tokens.
- Authors earn tokens by volunteering for venues, sharing expertise and availability, and submitting on-time, quality reviews, on whatever reviewing platform a venue uses.
- Authors spend tokens to submit manuscripts for review, splitting the cost with co-authors. Or, they can gift tokens to individuals or shared pools to strategically support newcomers, colleagues in crisis, or emerging topics.
Because authors need to submit high-quality, on-time reviews to submit, authors get better, faster reviews, editors do less nagging, communities overall have a fairer distribution of peer review labor.
We're in development! A public beta is likely in 2026. Visit GitHub🌐 to see who's involved, see our beta milestone🌐 for the work that remains. Subscribe to our low-volume newsletter🌐 to follow along. And if you feel like helping, email us! We're a small volunteer group of academics.