Peer Review Program Guidelines

ResearchHub Foundation is committed to restructuring the incentives that exist in academia currently. One step towards this to compensate peer reviewers for their contributions to the body of research

ResearchHub’s mission is to accelerate the pace of science. We believe one way to accomplish this is through financially incentivizing open peer reviews with ResearchCoin (RSC). Peer Reviews on ResearchHub are permissionless and don’t require approval to complete. This guide will walk you through signing up, finding papers with peer review bounties, writing peer reviews, and receiving compensation. Follow these 4 easy steps to complete a peer review and earn RSC in return.

1. Sign Up

  • Visit ResearchHub: Click the “Sign Up” button in the top right corner.

  • Register: Enter your email address OR register using your existing Google account.

  • Complete Your Profile: Fill in information such as your headline, education, social media links, (LinkedIn, X) and ORCID.

  • Identity Verification and Publication Import: To enhance the credibility and visibility of your contributions, please verify your identity on the ResearchHub platform. Additionally, you can easily import your publications using our streamlined workflow, ensuring your profile accurately reflects your scholarly work. Be sure to claim rewards on your recent open-access papers too!

  • Explore and Contribute: Begin exploring papers, participating in academic discussions, and contributing peer reviews.

2. Finding Preprints to Review

On ResearchHub, you can review any preprint of your choice by either browsing existing preprints or uploading a preprint from a preprint server (i.e. biorxiv, medrxiv, chemrxiv, arxiv, etc). Some preprints already have bounties, e.g. BioRxiv preprints are assigned a peer review bounty of $150 in RSC by the editorial team.

  • Browse New Preprints

    • ResearchHub automatically pulls in new preprints as they become public.

  • Search for Bounties

3. Writing a Peer Review

  • Do I Need Approval to Peer Review? No. Peer reviewing does not require any permission to complete. Review of all peer reviews is performed by our editors to verify quality before payment is disbursed.

  • Use In-line Comments (optional): If the paper PDF license allows, you may use in-line comments to link your thoughts to specific parts of the paper.

  • Navigate the Paper’s Page: Explore the tabs: Paper, Conversation, Bounties, and Peer Reviews.

  • Start Writing Your Review: Use the text box on the Peer Reviews tab. Organize your review using the provided rating boxes: Overall Rating, Methods, Impact, Results and Discussion. Be sure to assign a star rating for each.

Note: We recommend writing your reviews in a different text editor and pasting them in when you’re ready.

  • Be Professional and Constructive: Your reviews are visible to everyone, including the authors. Provide professional and constructive feedback.

  • AI in Peer Review: Reviews written with the use of AI are strictly prohibited! It’s your perspective as a scientist that makes the peer reviews valuable, so please write it in your own voice.

4. Receiving Payment

  • Payment Timeline: Payment is made within 7 days after the review submission window has closed.

    • Please note that our editorial team performs manual quality review checks on all peer reviews.

    • The top 3 highest quality reviews, as deemed by our editorial team, will receive payment.

    • All decisions by the editorial team are final.

  • Payment Amount: You will always receive $150 in ResearchCoin (RSC) at the time of distribution regardless of the price of RSC paid directly to your ResearchHub account.

    • For example, If RSC = $1, you will receive 150 RSC, if RSC = $.10, you will receive 1500 RSC. This is why you may see various amounts of RSC per review.

  • Using RSC: We encourage users to use RSC on our platform to fund research, open bounties, tip users, and pay for DOIs.

Converting RSC to Cash: If you would like to convert RSC to cash, (i.e. USD or other currencies) you can follow our walkthrough guide and blogpost.

Please note: As ResearchHub is an open platform for scientific discussion, you do not need to be approved to submit a peer review on any given article - however, this program is designed to gather a curated list of high quality peer reviewers who would like to receive notification of assignments that overlap with their skillset.

We also encourage users who are passionate and knowledgeable about a given area to suggest pre-prints to be peer-reviewed, by directly uploading these pre-prints to the BioRXiv Community Reviews Hub on ResearchHub

If you have additional questions please see our guide on Peer Reviewing on ResearchHub

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