Submission

• Flexibility: Recerts encourages you to go beyond traditional academic forms. The goal is to best communicate science and serve the reader.
• Scholarly recognition: Recerts articles are peer reviewed and are intended to be citable and indexable.
• Neutrality: Recerts provides a neutral platform for multiple authors to jointly publish. This is in contrast to a personal website, where outside contributors may get less credit.
• Impact: Recerts articles are designed to reach practitioners and researchers across mechanism design, incentive systems, and verification.

ISSN: coming soon · DOI: coming soon

Recerts Journal of Decentralized Funding Research (JDFR) is a peer‑reviewed venue for scholarship on collective funding mechanism design, incentive systems, and impact verification. We publish theoretical and empirical work that advances open, transparent, and decentralized approaches to allocating resources for public goods and scientific research. The distinguishing trait of a Recerts article is the scholar hypercert (or recert), which is a verifiable record of your work that tracks and rewards scholarship over time.

Recerts Journal is open to publishing a wide range of academic artifacts, provided they meet our editorial standards:

• Research: Recerts publishes novel research results of significant interest to the community.
• Exposition: Recerts publishes articles explaining, synthesizing and reviewing existing research. This includes Reviews, Tutorials, Primers, and Perspective articles. The editorial team is especially interested in explorable explanations.
• Commentary: Recerts occasionally publishes non‑technical essays on topics ranging from public policy to meta‑discussion of science. Please discuss intentions with editors@recerts.org prior to submission.
• Datasets & Benchmarks: Recerts is willing to publish datasets and benchmarks. Please discuss intentions with editors@recerts.org prior to submission.

There are no word count limits for any article type. Articles should be whatever length best serves the reader — just be aware that rambling is an easy failure mode.

• Advancing dialogue: All Recerts articles must significantly advance the research community’s dialogue. This could mean presenting significant novel results, giving a new perspective on known results, or even commentary on public policy.
• Outstanding communication: Recerts holds itself to an extremely high standard for communication.
• Scientific integrity: Articles should not only accurately report results, but also make sure high‑level description of work matches the results, and be transparent about any weaknesses.

Recerts provides the Recerts Reviewer Worksheet to help evaluate articles. Reviewers and authors alike are encouraged to refer to this worksheet, be it for self‑evaluation or during the review process.

In order for Recerts to best serve the community, and to create a respected space for non‑traditional contributions, it’s critical for Recerts to hold high publication standards. Unfortunately, this means many articles have to be rejected, including good articles that may be publishable elsewhere.

Recerts articles must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Recerts is a primary publication and will not publish content which is identical or substantially similar to content published elsewhere.

To submit an article, submit a recerts through the hypercert submission form.

Recerts handles all reviews and editing through EAS attestations.

Recerts only considers complete article submissions and evaluates them as is.

• Editorial Review
• Peer Review
• Post‑Publication Review

Recerts has ongoing review after publication. This allows subject experts and people trying to build on work to raise issues after publication. Peer reviewers give detailed feedback to help articles meet Recerts’s high standards. Recerts does an initial assessment of whether a submission looks like a fit. This saves both Recerts and the authors energy if it doesn’t make sense.

The first two stages of review are led by an editor. The editor will bring in external peer reviewers based on their discretion as to what perspectives are needed, optimizing for high‑quality review and an excellent review experience for all parties. The amount of time these stages take is highly variable depending on how responsive the authors are.

For all publications, Recerts will review for outstanding communication and design, in addition to scientific quality and integrity. Our reviewing criteria are more explicitly described in the Recerts Reviewer Worksheet, which will be used by external reviewers to evaluate a submission. We recommend authors also spend some time using it to self‑evaluate and identify areas for improvement.

In the third stage of review, readers can raise new concerns through EAS attestations. The issues will be moderated by Recerts’s moderators. Significant issues may be displayed in the article margin if the author does not address them.

Recerts may occasionally publish editorials, commentary, and invited content without peer review. This content will be clearly marked.

Recerts editors cannot be involved in the review process for a paper on which they are an author or where they are unable to be objective. In the event of a conflict of interest, Recerts editors will select a member of the research community to serve as a temporary “acting editor” for an article. The acting editor should be a member of the relevant research community, and at arm’s length to the authors. The use and identity of an acting editor will be noted in the review process log, and made public if the article is published.

Impact evaluation is a small field and Recerts’s editors will inevitably have prior relationships with some authors. Such relationships must be disclosed in the review process.

In order for Recerts to be effective in legitimizing non‑traditional publishing, it must be perceived as a primary academic publication. This means it’s important for us to follow typical “dual publication” norms. It’s also important for us to avoid the perception that Recerts is an “accompanying blog post” for something like an arXiv paper.

The result is that Recerts can only consider articles that are substantially different from those formally published elsewhere, and is cautious of articles informally published elsewhere. Below Recerts provides guidance for particular cases:

• No Prior Publication / Low‑Profile Informal Publication: No concerns!
• ArXiv Paper: Recerts is happy to publish a paper on research that has previously been published on arXiv, as long as there’s a clear understanding that Recerts is the formal publication.
• Previous Workshop / Conference Papers: Recerts is happy to publish more developed and polished “journal versions” of papers. These must substantively advance on the previous publications, through some combination of improving exposition, better surfacing of underlying insights and ways of thinking, consolidating a sequence of papers, or expanding with better experiments.
• High‑Profile Informal Publication: Recerts sees this as being very similar to publication in a workshop or conference, and has the same expectations as above.

If you have any concern, please email ethics@recerts.org. You can also reach out to Recerts’s editors or steering committee members individually if that feels more comfortable.

Recerts is still establishing policies and procedures. As issues arise, Recerts will consult with the community and give consideration to the policies of journals the editorial team respects, the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics, community norms, and the philosophy of the Open Science movement.

Recerts uses the following evaluation process for potential editors:

• Write an outstanding Recerts paper, demonstrating deep understanding of Recerts’s mission and the technical skills needed to evaluate others’ work.
• Interviews with existing editors discussing Recerts’s mission and the role of editors.

Being a Recerts editor means taking on ownership and responsibility for the success of Recerts and for publication decisions within your subject matter portfolio. Recerts editors are volunteer positions with no compensation — except playing a critical role in advancing a new kind of scientific publishing.

In the long‑run, the editorial team believes Recerts should be open to expanding to other disciplines, with new editors taking on different topic portfolios.

In considering editors for new topics, Recerts has the same expectations it has for all editors with two modifications:

• Although Recerts does not normally review papers outside its existing topic portfolio, the editorial team will make an exception to review papers from potential editorial candidates. The existing editorial team evaluates exposition while soliciting a third party editor to help us evaluate scientific merit, following Recerts’s regular review process. Because this type of review is especially difficult and expensive, Recerts will only move forward if the submission plausibly appears to be a very strong article.
• A second editor who can share responsibility for the topics you are taking on. This can either be an existing editor expanding to another topic, or someone applying along with you. Having a second editor is important so that editors have someone to talk over difficult cases with, and so that there isn’t a single point of failure.