1. The problem researchers actually feel

If you publish regularly, you know this rhythm: you submit a paper, it gets reviewed, you make changes… and if the journal doesn't take it, you start over somewhere else. Same paper, new submission, new reviewers. On top of that, when you review for journals, the recognition you get is mostly for how many reviews you do, not how good they are. That's upside down — because most real experts can only contribute a few, very high-quality reviews. The current setup doesn't reward that kind of contribution.

2. Why it keeps happening

This isn't because editors don't care. It's because every journal runs its peer review on its own. Reviews aren't shared, so when a paper moves to another journal, the whole thing is repeated. Authors do extra admin and resubmissions; reviewers reread versions of the same paper; the system burns time on duplication. The root cause is simple: journals compete with each other, so they can't easily reuse each other's peer review.

3. The better way: review once, submit broadly

Now imagine the review happens once, in a shared place. Researchers do a proper, high-quality peer review there. After that, journals don't need to run a full review again — they can just look at the reviewed manuscript and decide whether to publish. That lets authors submit to several journals in parallel with the same reviewed version, instead of doing it one by one. That alone saves researchers a lot of time (fewer resubmissions, fewer forms) and it eliminates duplicate peer review of the same work.

4. Where Paperstack comes in

Paperstack is the coordination layer that makes that shared, blind, researcher-to-researcher peer review practical. It gives everyone a single venue to review, it tracks who contributes, and it can reward quality rather than just counting how many reviews someone did. Because it sits above individual journals, it can motivate reviewers better than any single journal can. This is how researchers can finally build the peer review system they actually want — not the one constrained by journal competition.

5. Why this is an all-round win

With Paperstack:

• Researchers spend less time resubmitting and answering new rounds of review.
• Reviewers spend less effort repeating evaluations of nearly the same manuscript.
• Journals spend less money than if they ran the whole peer review pipeline themselves.
• And researchers don't pay for it — the cost sits where it already sits today.

So you end up with a system that produces better reviews, faster decisions, and lower costs. Same science, less friction.

1. Problem for journals

Coordinating peer review is a resource-intensive part of publishing. Identifying reviewers, following up, assessing review quality, and managing conflicts all consume editorial time. Journals also impose exclusivity because they cannot afford to review manuscripts that may be under consideration elsewhere.

2. Structural cause

Most journal run an isolated peer review process. When a manuscript is submitted to multiple journals over time, the same work is repeated by different editorial teams and reviewers. Because journals are in competition, they rarely share or reuse peer reviews, which leads to duplicated effort across the system.

3. Paperstack as a shared peer review layer

Paperstack coordinates peer reviews in an efficient centralized way. It manages the entire peer review process all without editorial overhead. The result is that paperstack can offer high quality peer reviews at a fraction of the cost of running a full peer review workflow in-house for the average journal. On the platform, authors retain ownership of their paper and its peer review. They can also directly submit their peer reviewed paper to multiple journals simultaneously. The result is journals choosing what to publish, not what to review and may be publish. For journals, this means they can grow their submissions faster and cheaper.

4. Submission options for authors → convenience for journals

1. Affiliate journals (integrated): journals that subscribe to Paperstack receive submissions via API. Manuscripts arrive with peer review already completed, so editors can move directly to an accept/decline decision. Furthermore, they can apply to have their journal guidelines integrated into the platform in the form of peer review templates.
2. Non-affiliate journals: authors can download the manuscript and its reviews and submit through the journal's usual channel.

In both cases, journals receive a paper with completed peer review.

5. Optional identity disclosure

Paperstack verifies reviewers. Affiliate and non-affiliate journals may, for a fee, access verified reviewer identities to perform conflict-of-interest checks or satisfy internal policies. This preserves author-facing anonymity while giving publishers full traceability when required.

6. Business and operational value

• Lower cost than running a full peer review workflow in-house.
• Editorial teams focus on selection and journal positioning rather than reviewer logistics.
• Higher-quality, pre-reviewed submissions from authors (since they can submit to several journals after one review).
• Flexible control: anonymity by default, identity available when needed.

Overall, Paperstack offers journals a cheaper, lighter, and better-documented peer review input without reducing editorial authority.

7. Current Status

Paperstack is currently developing its network and infrastructure. API integrations and subscriptions are not yet available for journals. Stay up to date by following the linked in page of the company in the footer.