Review Exchange Network

REN is for any researcher who wants more feedback on a paper before sending it to journals. The point is to refine the work, avoid wasted submission cycles, and stop burning editor desks and reviewer pools on drafts that aren't ready yet. Useful at any stage: a working paper, pre-submission, between rounds, or just when you want a sanity check from people in your field.

By application only. Free for approved members. Admission is selective. Applicants should have some publication experience in their discipline so reviews come from people who know the field. You also get a window into what others in your field are currently working on before those papers appear publicly.

Every paper receives ${requiredReviewerReports()} independent reviewer reports and ${requiredMetaReviews()} meta review that synthesises them, rates their quality, and evaluates the suggested solutions. The process is fully anonymous in all directions. Reviewers do not know who the other reviewers are, and the meta reviewer does not know who the reviewers are. This keeps evaluations unbiased and based purely on the quality of the work. Every member takes on both roles over time. For every 3 assignments, exactly 2 are reviewer roles and 1 is a meta reviewer role, keeping the workload balanced across the network.

Every judgment must come with a reason. Reviewers are asked not just to identify weaknesses but to explain why they undermine the paper, and not just to suggest solutions but to explain why those solutions would fix the problem. The meta reviewer rates each report on four dimensions: contribution assessment, weakness identification, weakness explanation, and solution quality. Reviews with specific convincing reasoning score in the upper half. Reviews without it score in the lower half regardless of whether the judgment is correct. Higher rated reviewers are matched with stronger reviewers for their own papers. Weak reviewers are placed in a thinner, lower rated pool where turnaround is slower and the feedback they receive is weaker. You get what you give.

Your paper is matched with a pool of vetted researchers in your field within your rating band, who can choose to accept reviewing your paper. Before accepting, reviewers can see the title and abstract. Full access is granted after they commit. Because reviewers choose which papers to accept, they should select papers that genuinely interest them, and this produces stronger, more engaged feedback for everyone.

REN is designed for fast turnaround but does not guarantee a specific number of days. It depends on other approved researchers accepting assignments. Once a reviewer accepts they have ${reviewerDeadlineDays()} days to submit. Once all reports are in and a meta reviewer accepts, they have ${metaDeadlineDays()} days to complete the meta review. The platform's incentives, deadlines, and credit structure are all designed to make feedback arrive much faster than a normal journal round.

When you accept a review you are making a commitment to complete feedback for another researcher, just as you would want others to do for you. If you miss a deadline, 1 credit is deducted and a review obligation is added. You cannot reaccept the same paper, and you cannot submit new papers or unlock any waiting reviews until you complete a review on a different paper. Multiple missed deadlines compound.

Completing a reviewer report or meta review earns +1 credit. Unlocking a completed review package costs ${requiredReviewerReports() + requiredMetaReviews()} credits, one for each of the ${requiredReviewerReports()} reviewer reports and ${requiredMetaReviews()} meta review. Your balance can go negative: if it does, you must complete enough reviews to bring it back to 0 before you can submit another paper or unlock another package. If your balance reaches 4, you cannot take on additional reviews until you submit a paper and unlock its completed package.

The feedback you receive exists because other researchers invested their time in your work. The credit system ensures that investment flows in both directions, throughout your career, not just once.

Papers are only accessible to assigned reviewers, viewed in a protected non copiable viewer, and forensically watermarked with reviewer identity. The PDF itself is never available for download by reviewers or the meta reviewer. They can only read it inside the protected viewer, never save a copy. Your paper is never publicly listed, and your reviews are equally protected. No one outside the review process can see them. REN does not share papers, reviews, or any part of the review process with anyone not directly involved in it. For the strongest protection, do not post your paper publicly before submitting to REN.

REN is designed to make sharing or reproducing the paper, whether with others or with AI, so time consuming, painful, and risky that genuine engagement is the rational choice. Capturing the content requires manually taking more than 100 screenshots of a narrow scroll window, uploading them across multiple AI conversations, reconciling fragmented output, and manually retyping everything since pasting is disabled.

Attempting it also carries real legal risk. Papers are protected by copyright and reviewers sign a declaration at submission confirming their review reflects their own genuine engagement. Documents are forensically watermarked, meaning violations are traceable. For researchers with professional reputations at stake, the consequences of being caught far outweigh the little time saved, if any. And even those who try would likely get poor fragmented output that an anonymous meta reviewer would quickly identify as low quality, resulting in lower ratings and worse reviewers for their own papers.

REN does not retain your work. Once the review process for a paper completes, the PDF and all associated reviews are deleted from REN's servers. The platform is built so that nothing about your paper lingers after the exchange is over. Minimal trace by design.

REN does not guarantee that a paper will be picked up, that feedback will point in one direction, or that using REN will guarantee publication success. If a paper is not picked up, that can itself be informative as a signal of field interest at that stage, and it may be worth revising your title and abstract to better attract reviewers, since that is what reviewers see before they choose to accept.