Peer review is one of the foundations of scholarly communication. Researchers dedicate significant amounts of time to evaluating manuscripts, checking methods, assessing whether conclusions are supported by evidence, and helping authors improve their work. Yet this essential contribution is usually unpaid.
Our view is simple… if researchers are already doing this essential work for free, why should predatory publishers be the ones profiting from their unpaid labour?
The Diamond Reviewer Pledge proposes a simple answer: dedicate at least some of that work to journals that give back to the scholarly community.
What is the Diamond Reviewer Pledge?
The Diamond Reviewer Pledge encourages researchers to commit to reviewing at least one article for a Diamond Open Access journal over the next 12 months. This initiative has been launched by FORRT and the Münster Center for Open Science.
Diamond Open Access journals are peer-reviewed journals that are free for authors to publish in and free for everyone to read. So, there are no subscription fees to access their articles and no Article Processing Charges (APCs) to publish in them. Many of these journals are also managed by universities, learned societies or scholarly communities rather than commercial publishers.
And this distinction matters. When researchers provide unpaid peer review to commercial publishers, part of the value created by that work leaves the research system in the form of private profit. But, in Diamond Open Access, that value stays within the scholarly community that produced the research. Your review helps improve an article that anyone can read, including the people whose taxes may have funded the research in the first place.
The Diamond Reviewer initiative highlights an estimate that the time spent by researchers in the United States on peer review in 2020 alone represented more than USD 1.5 billion in labour value.
The commitment is simple. Becoming a Diamond Reviewer does not mean saying no to every invitation from a commercial journal. The pledge is not a boycott, but a minimum commitment to support Diamond Open Access by reviewing at least one article.
On its own, one review will not transform scholarly publishing. But when many researchers make similar choices, those individual contributions can help strengthen community-led infrastructures and make open scholarly communication more sustainable.
Perhaps the question to ask the next time a peer-review invitation arrives is therefore not only “Do I have time to review this paper?”, but also:
“What kind of scholarly publishing system is my time helping to sustain?”