How to get involved

In brief

The Unjournal (see our In a nutshell) wants your involvement, help, and feedback. We offer rewards and strive to compensate people for their time and effort.

1. Join our team: Complete this form to apply for our...

   1. Evaluator pool: to be eligible to be commissioned and paid to evaluate and rate research, mainly in quantitative social science and policy

   2. Field specialist teams: help identify, prioritize, and manage research evaluation in a particular field or cause area. A related lower-commitment role: #unjournal-research-affiliates-ura help suggest, prioritize, and discuss research>

   3. Management team or advisory board, to be part of our decision-making

2. Suggest research for us to assess using this form. We offer bounty rewards. Submit your own research here, or by contacting [e-mail]

3. Do an Independent Evaluation to build your portfolio, receive guidance, and be eligible for promotion and prizes. See details Independent evaluations (trial)

4. Suggest "Pivotal questions" for us to focus on

Give us feedback: Is anything unclear? What could be improved? Email [e-mail]. We will offer rewards for the most useful suggestions.

Overview and call

David Reinstein is the founder and co- of The Unjournal. The organization is currently looking for field specialists and evaluators, as well as suggestions for relevant work for The Unjournal to evaluate.

The Unjournal team is building a system for credible, public, journal-independent feedback and evaluation of research.

Briefly, The Unjournal’s basic process is:

• Identify, invite, or select contributions of relevant research that on any open platform or archive in any format.

• Pay evaluators to give careful feedback on this work, with prizes and incentives for strong evaluation work.

• Elicit quantifiable and comparable metrics of research quality as credible measures of value (see: evaluator guidelines). Synthesize the results of these evaluations in useful ways.

• Publicly post and link all reviews of the work. Award financial prizes for the work judged strongest.

• Allow evaluators to choose if they wish to remain anonymous or to "sign" their reviews.

• Aim to be as transparent as possible in these processes.

We maintain an open call for participants for several different roles:

1. Management Committee members (involving honorariums for time spent)
2. Advisory Board members (no time commitment)
3. Field Specialists (who will often also be on the Advisory Board)
4. Unjournal Research Affiliates (low commitment)
5. A pool of Evaluators (who will be paid for their time and their work; we also draw evaluators from outside this pool)

The roles are explained in more detail here. You can express your interest (and enter our database) here.

Some particular research area/field priorities (Sept. 2024)

We're interested in researchers and research-users who want to help us prioritize work for evaluation, and manage evaluations, considering

... research in any social science/economics/policy/impact-assessment area, and

... research with the potential to be among the most globally-impactful.

Some particular areas where we are hoping to expand our expertise (as of 15 Aug 2023) include:

- Biological & pandemic risk

- AI governance, AI safety

- Long-term trends, demography

- Macroeconomics/growth/(public) finance

- Quantitative political science (voting, lobbying, etc.)

- Social impact of new technology (including AI)

Evaluators

We will reach out to evaluators (a.k.a. "reviewers") on a case-by-case basis, appropriate for each paper or project being assessed. This is dependent on expertise, the researcher's interest, and a lack of conflict of interest.

Time commitment: Case-by-case basis. For each evaluation, here are some guidelines for the amount of time to spend.

Compensation: We pay a minimum of $200 (updated Aug. 2024) for a prompt and complete evaluation, $400 for experienced evaluators. We offer additional prizes and incentives, and are committed to an average compensation of at least $450 per evaluator. See here for more details.

Who we are looking for: We are putting together a list of people interested in being an evaluator and doing paid referee work for The Unjournal. We generally prioritize the pool of evaluators who signed up for our database before reaching out more widely.

Interested? Please fill out this form (about 3–5 min, same form for all roles or involvement).

Ready to get started doing evaluations and building a track record? See our new Independent evaluations (trial) initiative, offering prizes and recognition for the best work. You can evaluate work in our public database, or suggest and evaluate work.

Projects and papers

We are looking for high-quality, globally pivotal research projects to evaluate, particularly those embodying open science practices and innovative formats. We are putting out a call for relevant research. Please suggest research here. (We offer bounties and prizes for useful suggestions – .) For details of what we are looking for, and some potential examples, see this post and accompanying links.

You can also put forward your own work.

Contact us

If you are interested in discussing any of the above in person, please email us ([e-mail]) to arrange a conversation.

Note: This is under continual refinement; see our policies for more details.