The Unjournal
The Unjournal

Benefits & Features

Journal-independent evaluation that prioritizes rigor, transparency, and real-world impact over prestige metrics.

100+ Evaluations
53 Papers Assessed
$450+ Avg. Evaluator Pay
$0 Submission Fee

Why The Unjournal?

Traditional academic publishing is slow, expensive, and misaligned with real-world impact. Researchers spend months reformatting papers. Peer review is unpaid, opaque, and produces binary accept/reject decisions. We built something better.

No Formatting Games

Submit your publicly hosted preprint, working paper, or any other research object, in whatever format you like. We evaluate the research, not the styling. What we look for.

Transparent Assessment

All evaluations are public, creating valuable metrics for authors, researchers, and funders. No more black-box peer review. See our evaluator guidelines.

Global Impact Focus

We prioritize research on global health, development, animal welfare, climate, and catastrophic risks. Evaluators assess reliability, robustness, and real-world usefulness.

Open Science

Supporting replicability and methodological rigor. We encourage dynamic documents, code integration, and transparent methods. Part of the broader open evaluation movement.

Living Research

Research evolves through feedback, new data, and refinements. We support living projects that aren't frozen in PDF form. Authors can respond publicly to evaluations.

Non-Exclusive

Having your work evaluated by us doesn't limit your options. Submit to any traditional journal before, during, or after our process. We don't claim publishing rights.

How Our Process Works

From submission to public evaluation in weeks, not years. Our evaluation workflow is designed for efficiency and transparency.

The Unjournal evaluation workflow: from submission through prioritization, expert evaluation, author response, to public publication with DOIs
Our evaluation workflow — view detailed documentation

Structured Rating Interface

Evaluators provide ratings with 90% confidence intervals, anchored to journal-tier benchmarks.

Evaluation form showing rating slider with confidence interval inputs and journal-tier scale from 0 (won't publish) to 5 (top journal) Preview draft interface

Current form: Coda evaluation form

Ratings by Research Area

Explore how papers score across 12 research areas, from global health to AI governance.

Scatter plot showing overall ratings of 54 papers across research areas including Global Health, Development Economics, Environment, and Animal Welfare Open interactive dashboard

See our full rating criteria for details on each dimension.

How We Compare

The Unjournal works alongside traditional publishing, not instead of it. Here's how our model differs:

Traditional Journals

  • Extensive formatting requirements
  • Anonymous, private peer review
  • Unpaid reviewers
  • Binary accept/reject decisions
  • Private revision cycles
  • Often exclusive submission
  • Months to years turnaround
  • Focus on novelty and "fit"

The Unjournal

Explore Our Output

All evaluations, ratings, and author responses are publicly available. See what journal-independent evaluation looks like in practice.

Published Evaluations

Full evaluation reports with expert feedback, quantitative ratings across multiple dimensions, and author responses. Everything receives a DOI and is indexed in scholarly databases.

Browse on PubPub

Interactive Dashboard

Explore ratings data across all evaluations. Filter by topic, visualize rating distributions, and download the underlying data for your own analysis.

Open Dashboard

Learn More

Dive deeper into our documentation, policies, and community.

Experience the Difference

Whether you're a researcher seeking quality feedback, an evaluator who wants recognition for review work, or a funder looking for credibility signals.

Submit Your Research Become an Evaluator Get Email Updates