Give your peer review to the journals that give back
Diamond Open Access journals are academic journals that are led by scholars. They do not charge for publication or reading and, unlike commercial journals, they are aligned with scholarly interest. We believe that in a world where an increasing amount of work is submitted for publication and requires peer review, scholars should prioritize reviewing for such journals as opposed to pay-to-publish or pay-to-read journals.
As signatories of the Diamond Reviewer Pledge, we commit to reviewing at least one article in the next 12 months for a diamond open access journal.
Why it matters where you review
Peer review is unpaid work. Researchers, most of them on public salaries, write the papers, review them, and edit the journals. Publishers organise that work and charge for the result.
That money leaves the research system and does not come back. Diamond journals charge no one: Your review stays inside the community that produced the work, and the article it improves can be read by anyone, including the people whose taxes paid for it.
How do I know if a journal is diamond open access?
Six places to check, in roughly the order we would try them.
- Diamond Discovery Hub — A directory of diamond journals. Many newer journals are not listed there yet.
- DOAJ — Filter the journal search for "without fees", which indicates that a journal charges no article processing charge.
- Open Journals — Check the PUBLISHING MODEL variable.
- OpenAlex — Search the journal under Sources and filter or check the APC field. An APC of zero together with an open licence is a good indicator.
- Free Journal Network — A member network of journals that are free for authors and readers and run according to the Fair Open Access Principles.
- DOAB — The DOAJ equivalent for open access books and book publishers.
When none of these settles it, the journal's own website usually does, under "about", "fees", or "author guidelines".
| Open Access Type | Free-to-read | Free-to-publish | Authors retain copyright | Peer-reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Gold | ✔ | ✖ | ? | ✔ |
| Hybrid | Only for paid articles | Only for closed articles | ? | ✔ |
| Closed | ✖ | ✔ | ✖ | ✔ |
✔ = yes · ✖ = no · ? = varies by journal. In the diamond model neither authors nor readers pay, and the scholarly community owns the publication.
Signatories
Join
Sign the pledge: Commit to reviewing at least one article in the next 12 months for a diamond open access journal.
Guidelines for Reviewers
Signing takes a minute. The pledge is about what you do with the next review request in your inbox. These guidelines are suggestions, not requirements for signing.
Before you say yes
- Check the journal's publishing model. Look it up in the Diamond Discovery Hub, Open Journals, the DOAJ, in OpenAlex, the Free Journal Network, or on the journal's own "about" and "fees" pages.
- Give diamond requests priority. Diamond journals are usually run by a handful of volunteers with no editorial office staff to fall back on. A fast yes is worth much more there than at a journal with a paid managing editor.
- Budget your reviewing. Decide how many reviews per year you can do well (a common heuristic: about three reviews per paper you publish), and reserve at least one of those slots for a diamond journal.
- Commit only when you have capacity. When accepting a peer review request, ensure that you have the capacity to deliver the review in a timely manner.
Be proactive
- Volunteer. Most diamond journals have a "become a reviewer" form. If they don't, you can email the editors to express your availability. Tick the reviewer database box when you sign the pledge.
- Review preprints through Peer Community In. PCI organises free public review of preprints, and neither authors nor readers pay. Those reviews count for the pledge.
- Submit to diamond journals yourself, and recommend them when colleagues ask you where to submit.
Review well
- Be on time. Agree only to deadlines you can keep, and tell the editor immediately if you slip. Volunteer-run journals have more difficulty accommodating silent delays.
- Review the work, not the author. Be civil, specific, and constructive. Separate "this is wrong" from "this is not what I would have done". Write the type of review you would like to receive yourself.
- Prioritise rigour over novelty. Assess the question, design, analysis, and the match between claims and evidence. Ask for materials, data, code, and check them where you can.
- Say what would convince you. Actionable requests are worth more than a verdict.
- Declare conflicts of interest and use AI tools only within the journal's policy — never paste an unpublished manuscript into a service that retains it.
Get and give credit
- Consider open review. Sign your report or allow it to be published with the article if the journal offers it. Open reports are citable scholarly output. They tend to be more constructive and allow the authors to reach out in case of questions.
- Record your reviews in ORCID and list them on your CV and in evaluations. Journals can deposit review activity via Crossref.
- Make the norm visible. Add the badge to your website or signature, and mention the pledge when you decline a request from a pay-to-publish or pay-to-read journal — e.g. "I have committed to prioritising peer review for diamond open access journals. I am happy to review for you if the article is openly available without an APC."
Guidelines for Editors of DOA Journals
Reviewers can only prioritise you if they can find you and recognise you as diamond. Editors, here is how to make that easy.
Be findable and legible as diamond
- State it on the landing page: "No article processing charges. No subscription. Authors retain copyright (CC BY)." One sentence, above the fold, not buried in a policies page.
- Register the facts in DOAJ, the Diamond Discovery Hub, OpenAlex, and your indexing services, and keep the APC field explicitly at zero.
- Publish your scope, criteria, and timelines, including median times to first decision and to publication.
Recruit reviewers deliberately
- Keep a public "review for us" form with expertise keywords, methods and availability, and actually use the resulting database.
- Invite pledge signatories and say so in the invitation. A line such as "We are a diamond open access journal — free to read, free to publish, authors retain copyright" raises acceptance rates.
- Recruit early-career researchers, ideally with a co-review or mentored-review scheme that credits both people by name.
- Link to this pledge from your reviewer pages, and tell us about your journal so we can point reviewers to you.
Respect reviewer time — it is the journal's only real budget
- Desk-screen properly. Never send out a manuscript that is out of scope, incomplete, or unreadable.
- Set realistic deadlines (three to four weeks) and send polite reminders when reviewers are late.
- Provide editorial guidance. Editors should adjudicate rather than forward every disagreement back to the reviewers.
- Close the loop. Send the decision letter and the other reports to every reviewer. It costs nothing and provides reviewers with valuable feedback.
- Adopt transparency policies (data, code, and materials availability; preregistration where applicable; Registered Reports) so that reviewers can actually evaluate what they are asked to evaluate.
Credit the work
- Deposit review activity to ORCID via Crossref, and issue certificates on request.
- Publish an annual thank-you list of reviewers (with consent).
- Offer open, DOI-bearing reports for reviewers who want their work to be citable.
Stay diamond, sustainably
- Use community infrastructure (OJS, Janeway, Episciences, PKP Preservation Network, CLOCKSS) and get DOIs and long-term archiving in place.
- Fund the journal through institutions, libraries, consortia and grants, not through authors. Publish your funding model.
- Do not flip to APCs. If costs grow, share them across the community before shifting them onto authors.
FAQ
Peer review is free labour. Researchers — largely paid from public money — write the papers, review them, and edit the journals. The publisher organises and typesets, then charges for the result. Aczel, Szászi, and Holcombe valued the time reviewers donated in 2020 at over 1.5 billion US dollars in the US alone. Global spending on journal publishing between 2019 and 2025 has been estimated at more than USD 15 billion, and the largest commercial publishers report operating margins above 30 %.
The business model also creates a structural conflict of interest. Under article processing charges, every additional accepted manuscript is additional revenue, so the commercial incentive points toward volume rather than toward strict quality control. Reviewers are the only unpaid part of the quality-control chain, and the party that profits from a fast acceptance is not the party doing the checking.
Meanwhile, the people who pay for the research often cannot read it. Much of the literature written by publicly funded researchers and reviewed by publicly funded scholars sits behind paywalls that the general public, practitioners and colleagues at less wealthy institutions cannot pass. Where it is open, it is often open because someone paid an APC: commonly USD 2,000–4,000, and up to roughly EUR 9,500 at the most prestigious titles. Those figures sit far above plausible per-article production costs and are unaffordable for most of the world's researchers.
Large publishers have also become data businesses. Elsevier's parent company RELX makes much of its revenue from analytics and risk products. Academic platforms track user behaviour, and researcher and usage data are aggregated into products sold back to universities, funders and, in the case of other RELX units, to third parties including government agencies. See the German Research Foundation's briefing paper "Data Tracking in Research" (DFG, 2021) and SPARC's work on vendor surveillance.
Finally, "high-ranking" is not a property of the publisher. It is produced by authors, editors and reviewers, and it can be built elsewhere. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, Journal of Statistical Software, Glossa, Discrete Analysis, the Peer Community Journal, and Meta-Psychology are all free to read, free to publish, and well cited. The pledge asks for one article per year on the scholar-led side, and it does not stop you reviewing for the journals in your field you consider important.
A peer-reviewed journal that charges neither readers nor authors, is typically owned and run by the scholarly community rather than a commercial publisher, and normally lets authors retain copyright under an open licence.
Waived or discounted APCs do not make a journal diamond. The model, not the individual exemption, is what matters.
Peer Community In is a set of discipline-based communities of researchers who publicly review and recommend preprints. Authors pay nothing, readers pay nothing, the reviews are published alongside the preprint, and a recommended preprint can afterwards be submitted to a journal or published in the Peer Community Journal.
Yes, reviewing for a PCI community counts for the pledge. It works the same way as reviewing for a diamond journal: Your time goes to a venue nobody is charged to use.
No. The pledge is a minimum, not a boycott: At least one review for a diamond journal in the next 12 months. Many signatories will continue to review for society and commercial titles as well. If you do decline elsewhere, saying why is the most useful part of the decision.
Then be proactive: Volunteer through a journal's reviewer form, email editors in your area, tick the reviewer database box when you sign, or review a preprint through PCI. The pledge is a good-faith commitment. Nobody audits it, and nobody is penalised for a year in which the invitations did not arrive.
Reviewing is rarely evaluated by venue prestige in the first place — it is counted as service. Diamond journals are often better at crediting it: Open, citable reports with DOIs, ORCID deposits, and public reviewer lists. And because many of these journals are young, good reviewers with relevant expertise are frequently invited onto editorial boards, which is service that does appear in evaluations.
What we store. Your name, affiliation, email address, the date you signed, your privacy preferences and — if you provide one — your ORCID iD. The data are held in a private spreadsheet accessible only to the organizers.
What is public. Your name and affiliation, the month you signed, and your ORCID iD if you asked for it to be shown. If you tick "keep my name private", your entry reads [anonymous] and shows only your affiliation. Your email address is never published, sold, or shared.
What we use your email for. Confirming that you are the person who signed. If you also tick the contact box, occasional updates about the initiative — we expect at most a few per year.
Controller. Münster Center for Open Science, University of Münster.
Legal basis and your rights. Consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), which you can withdraw at any time. Every email we send contains a link that removes your entry and deletes your personal data. You can also write to us to access or correct it.
Who are we?
The Diamond Reviewer Pledge is a small, volunteer-run initiative. Our goal is to raise awareness about diamond open access publishing and to support diamond open access journals. It costs nothing to sign and nothing to run.
Steven Verheyen Erasmus University Rotterdam Lukas Röseler Münster Center for Open Science, University of Münster
Conflict of interest
The organizers are editors of Replication Research, a diamond open access journal. We run the kind of journal this pledge asks you to review for, so we stand to gain from it.
Initiatives we took inspiration from
- Collective Action in Science — Diamond, which asks researchers to pledge collectively so that nobody has to move first.
- The Preregistration Pledge, for the model of a single, checkable commitment with a deadline.
- The Peer Reviewers' Openness Initiative (PRO), for showing that reviewers can change publishing norms from where they already sit.