How It Works

Step 1 — Register on our webpage

Create an account in our submission system at advances.pub. Alongside your name and email we ask for your ORCID and, importantly, the research fields and topics you are willing to review in. Editors search that profile when they need expertise, so the more precise it is, the more relevant your invitations will be — and the fewer you will want to decline.

Registering does not commit you to anything. You are invited paper by paper, and you are free to say no.

Step 2 — Sign the consultation agreement

When you accept an invitation you sign a short consultation agreement electronically. It engages you as an independent consultant for that specific task.

Two things follow from that. You remain self-employed throughout and are at no point employed by us. And you are solely responsible for any tax due in your own country — the fee is tax inclusive, so it does not cover tax on top.

Step 3 — Review or edit the paper

As a reviewer, respond to the invitation as quickly as you can, decline if there is any conflict of interest, and then submit your report within three weeks — two is better. We practise a mentoring approach to peer review: open with a paragraph summarising the paper, say what works before what does not, and when you raise a weakness suggest a concrete way to address it. Reviews are double-blind, and the anonymised report is published alongside the accepted article.

As an editor, you make the initial decision on submission, desk-rejecting what does not fit — briefly and constructively, because desk rejections land hard. For papers with real potential you invite no more than two reviewers: ideally one specialist in the paper’s own field and one from an adjacent one, so the work is both rigorous and legible to a wider readership. You read the manuscript yourself before you read the reports, then decide to accept, reject or request revisions.

We actively discourage more than two rounds of review. It rarely improves a paper in proportion to the work it costs everyone.

The full expectations for both roles are set out in the guidelines for editors and reviewers.

Step 4 — Pass the quality check

Paying for reviews only works if the reviews are good, so every completed piece of work is checked against published minimum standards before it is approved. A review needs to:

• open with a paragraph summarising the paper, demonstrating that you engaged with the whole of it;
• give detailed, accurate and constructive feedback on both strengths and weaknesses;
• cover every section — introduction, methods, results, discussion;
• arrive within three weeks of your receiving the manuscript, unless we agreed otherwise in advance;
• be professional and polite, and meet ordinary ethical and scientific standards.

You will also answer a few multiple-choice questions about the paper. Where an editor asked for several rounds, all of the requested reviews must be complete before the process counts as finished.

Generative AI must not be used to write reviews, and no part of a manuscript may be entered into such a tool. Pasting a manuscript into a language model breaches author confidentiality, and the output tends to be superficial or simply invented. Using AI to language-edit your own text is acceptable only if no confidential material goes into it, and must be disclosed to the editors. The full policy — covering authors and editors as well — is in the guidelines.

Step 5 — Get paid, or donate the money

Once the editor approves your work, send us an invoice. We pay it within 14 days, by PayPal or international bank transfer.

Each completed review process is USD 100, inclusive of any taxes that may apply. One process can span several rounds of review of the same paper. A desk rejection made without reviews does not count as a completed process, and an editor who assigns an action editor rather than handling the paper is not compensated for it.

About a quarter of our reviewers donate their fee rather than take it. If you would like to, we will send it to one of the causes listed at givingwhatwecan.org.