Ready to get your paper reviewed and closer to publication?
Submit a preprint and have it reviewed in the open. 100 papers go to a paid human expert, and every paper the human expert certifies earns its author $500.
Entry is free and open to any discipline. Your manuscript is posted as a preprint with a DOI and receives reports from several named AI reviewers, in minutes to hours, published alongside the paper.
Up to 100 entries are then sent to an expert in the field, paid by XSci, for one decision: whether, after revision of the kind a journal would normally ask for, the paper has the potential to be published in the target journals the authors named, or, where they named none, in the top journals of its field, provided it contains no major error.
Each accepted paper becomes an XSci Peer-Certified Preprint, and its submitting author receives the XSci Open Review Award 2026 and $500.
Places for expert review are given in two ways.
From the opening day, entries whose AI reports clearly place them as candidates for the leading journals in their field are admitted daily in submission order, until 60 places are taken. Every other entry stays in the pool for the post-close allocation, so there is a reason to enter early. The bar may be reviewed once, on 5 October.
The remaining places are allocated after the close, by discipline in proportion to entries received, and then by ranking within each discipline. Naming an ambitious target journal helps if the reviewers find the fit plausible. The method note on 6 November describes the signals and the decisions without the threshold value. The full method with thresholds and adjustments is published with the final results.
Entrants not selected for expert review receive $49 off the XSci human review service for the same paper, valid till 31 March 2027.
25 Sep 2026
5 Oct 2026
The bar may be reviewed once, on 5 October.
6 Nov 2026
The method note describes the signals and the decisions without the threshold value.
30 Nov 2026
23:59 Anywhere on Earth.
End of December
The full method with thresholds and adjustments is published with the final results.
Entries open 25 September 2026 and close 30 November 2026, 23:59 Anywhere on Earth. Results for early admissions come as they are ready; final results by the end of December.
You keep every right to your work and may submit it elsewhere at any time.
Papers already published in a journal or proceedings are not eligible; papers preprinted or under review elsewhere are.
You can choose which AI reviewers to use and can enter with none.
For the selected 100 papers, authors can make the report private without paying as they are on XSci, but they will lose the eligibility for the cash prize or the award. For all papers, making an AI report private costs the usual disclosure discount and does not affect eligibility.
Any published report, from an AI reviewer or from an expert, can be answered by you on the same page, in public and at no cost.
Each author may enter up to three papers, with co-authors' agreement.
More papers are written today than at any point in history, and AI has accelerated the writing faster than anything has ever accelerated for the reading. The machinery that checks this output is struggling: a small number of unpaid experts, recruited slowly, writing private letters that most readers will never see. The bottleneck has moved. It is no longer hard to produce a paper. It is hard to know which papers to trust.
XSci publishes a paper's reviews alongside it, from several named AI systems and from paid experts, with the authors answering back on the same page. As far as we know, no other venue lets the world watch AI review being tested against real papers in public.
We do not yet know how AI referees rank papers across disciplines, how quickly qualified experts will accept paid reviews in fields where nobody has asked them before, or how often they will overrule the machines. When the competition closes we will publish the method used to select papers, the breakdown of entries and awards by discipline, and where the process went wrong and should be improved. If you think the approach is mistaken, the reviews are public and so is the space to say so.
Submit the manuscript on xsci.com and select the competition.
Any researcher, in any discipline and any country. The submitting author must verify an ORCID iD or an institutional email address.
The manuscript must not have been published in a journal or conference proceedings. Manuscripts posted as preprints elsewhere, or under review elsewhere, are eligible.
Yes. Authors keep all rights and may submit the work anywhere else at any time.
No. The AI referee reports are published on the preprint page. A report may still be taken down by paying the standard difference between the two prices, and the entry remains eligible.
Yes. All your co-authors must have agreed to the entry and to the publication of the expert review report, which is what entry to the award turns on. If you want to take down the Human expert review report, you'll cease to be considered for the award, but you don't need to pay the normal price difference in the competition.
Entries whose reports clearly place them above a fixed bar are admitted daily in submission order, and every other entry stays in the pool for the post-close allocation. The bar may be reviewed once, on 5 October. The method note on 6 November describes the signals and the decisions above without the threshold value. The full method with thresholds and adjustments is published with the results.
We are at the start of the public test and will publish the numbers by discipline in December.
No. It is a preprint platform. Work appears here first, with its record of scrutiny, and then goes on to journals or other outcomes.
Reports are public by default, under the reviewer's group identity, and judged against the author's stated target journals. Authors can appeal within 14 days, and if the appeal is successful, XSci commissions a second expert whose view is final. Reviewer supply and reviewer quality are among the things the December report will cover honestly, including where they fell short.
Do you have questions about the XSci Open Review Competition 2026?
Contact us at competition@xsci.com