At PubPeer, we aim to combat the reliance on journal names as proxies for scientific quality—an issue that undermines open-access publishing, enables shady practices like papermills, and incentivizes questionable research. While evaluators worldwide still rely on high-impact journals for convenience, we believe a robust, independent system of research evaluation by scientists can refocus incentives on publishing solid, reproducible work and diminish the influence of publication metrics.
PubPeer has become the reference platform for addressing doubts about the integrity of scientific publications. However, many researchers hold valuable insights into issues within their fields that remain unshared, limiting their impact on the broader community. We want to encourage you to share that expert analysis on PubPeer to help advance scientific evaluation.
To further encourage the sharing of valuable insights, we are awarding $1,000 awards for selected comments that provide significant, original contributions to scientific discussions. These awards will be given monthly based on comment frequency.
We invite everyone—students, postdocs, journal clubs—to participate and help identify outstanding contributions. If you're looking for good examples, this one is exceptional and the PubPeer front page, which already highlights moderator-selected comments, will likely feature the winners (and please let us know if you spot deserving entries that aren't highlighted). Together, we can build a stronger, more transparent evaluation system for science.
FAQs
What are the criteria? Comments providing significant new scientific insight into a publication.
Who is eligible? Anybody not connected to the PubPeer Foundation.
How frequent are the rewards? We're aiming for one per month.
How are winners chosen? Our team will select standout contributions.
Can anonymous comments win? Yes, but the commenter will need to identify themselves to us to receive their prize. (ensure you save the access code provided when leaving an anonymous comment, as it will be required for verification if your comment is selected)
Got suggestions? Signal great comments to us here or via email.