About Peerclave

Peer review in medicine depends on a small number of subspecialty experts who are asked to review without payment and on indefinite timelines. Peerclave exists to give journals a dependable route to those reviewers, and to give reviewers a fixed fee, a defined deadline, and certainty that they will be paid for the work they submit.

Every review submitted through Peerclave follows a structured format. The format requires the reviewer to address defined sections: the study question, design and methods, analysis, reporting, interpretation, and a recommendation to the editor.

The purpose of the format is verification. Payment is conditional on a review being complete, and completeness must be something that can be checked rather than argued. A review that addresses every section of the format is complete for the purposes of payment, regardless of the position it takes.

Where a journal considers a submitted review to be incomplete, or a reviewer considers that payment has been wrongly withheld, the matter is referred to Peerclave. Peerclave assesses the review against the structured format and decides whether it is complete. That decision determines payment.

A journal cannot withhold payment on its own authority. A journal's disagreement with the substance of a review, its recommendation, or its tone is not grounds for withholding payment. Concerns of that kind should be raised with Peerclave, which may take them into account in future matching, but they do not affect payment for the review already submitted.

Disputes are normally decided within ten working days of referral. Both parties are given the reasons for the decision in writing.

Peerclave is operated by Strata Collective.

General enquiries, editor applications, and dispute referrals: contact@peerclave.com