Papers
How Science Official Papers works
An open place for research: anyone can share a paper, verified scientists review it in public, and the newsroom of Science Official writes about the strongest work.
1. Anyone can upload
Create a free account and upload your paper as a text PDF — exported from Word, LaTeX or Google Docs, not scanned. We check the text layer on upload, because readers and Google Scholar need to search inside your paper. Add the abstract, authors, field and, if the paper was published, its DOI: we can fill most details in from Crossref, arXiv or PubMed.
You decide what readers get: the full PDF, or the abstract only with the PDF available to verified reviewers. You also say which version it is — a preprint, the accepted manuscript or the published version. Check your publisher’s rules before sharing the published version.
Every paper gets a permanent page with the citation tags Google Scholar reads, so it can appear in Scholar search and collect citations.
2. Verified scientists
Anyone can describe themselves in their profile. The Verified scientist badge is different: it means we checked that you do research. You apply with your institution, position and degree, and we confirm it against open sources — your institutional email on the institution’s domain (from the ROR registry), your ORCID record, and your publications in OpenAlex. A moderator makes the decision and sets the fields in which you can review.
3. Open reviews
A verified scientist can review papers in their own fields. Reviews are public and signed. Each review rates the paper on two scales, adapted from the eLife assessment:
Significance of the findings
- Landmark — findings with profound implications that are likely to change the field
- Fundamental — findings that substantially advance our understanding of major questions
- Important — findings that have theoretical or practical implications beyond a single subfield
- Valuable — findings that have theoretical or practical implications for a subfield
- Useful — findings that have focused importance and scope
Strength of the evidence
- Exceptional — exemplary use of existing approaches that establish new standards for the field
- Compelling — evidence that is convincing and uses methods more rigorous than the current state of the art
- Convincing — appropriate and validated methodology in line with the current state of the art
- Solid — methods, data and analyses broadly support the claims, with only minor weaknesses
- Incomplete — main claims are only partially supported
- Inadequate — methods, data and analyses do not support the primary claims
To keep reviews independent, a scientist cannot review their own paper, a paper by a co-author (we check shared publications in OpenAlex), a paper by someone from the same institution, or a paper by someone who has reviewed their work.
A review on this site is an expert opinion, not journal peer review. We say so on every paper page.
4. From review to coverage
When a verified scientist rates the evidence at least solid and recommends the paper, it becomes a candidate for coverage. Editors of Science Official read every candidate and decide whether to write about it. If they do, the article links to the paper and the paper page links to the article.
5. Connected to open science
Papers here are described in the formats that the open research world uses: Highwire Press tags for Google Scholar, schema.org for search engines, and OAI-PMH for aggregators of open repositories. Profiles link to ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearchGate and OpenReview.