Introducing Science Official Papers: research shared, and reviewed in the open

For as long as Science Official has existed, our work has started with someone else's paper. A study appears in a journal or on a preprint server, our editors read it, check what it claims and what it does not, and write about it for readers who will never open the PDF themselves. Today we are adding the step that comes before that article: a place where the research itself can live.

Science Official Papers opens today at scienceofficial.org/papers. It is an open repository where anyone who does research, from a PhD student to a professor or an independent scholar, can share a paper, have it assessed in public by verified scientists, and put it in front of the newsroom that decides what our readers learn about next.

Sharing a paper

Creating an account is free. To upload, a researcher adds the PDF, the abstract, the authors in the order of the paper and the field the work belongs to. If the paper already has a DOI, an arXiv number or a PubMed ID, most of the details fill themselves in from Crossref, arXiv or PubMed.

We accept text PDFs only, exported directly from Word, LaTeX or Google Docs. Every file is checked on upload, and scanned images are turned away with an explanation. The reason is practical: a paper that cannot be searched cannot be found, by readers or by Google Scholar.

Each paper gets a permanent page, described in the format that Google Scholar reads, so it can appear in Scholar search and collect citations. Authors decide what readers get: the full PDF, or the abstract alone with the full text kept for reviewers. They also say which version they are sharing, a preprint, an accepted manuscript or the published article, because publishers treat those differently.

Verified scientists

Anyone can describe themselves in a profile. The Verified scientist badge means something more: that we have checked that a person does research. Applicants tell us where they work, their position and their degree. We then look for independent confirmation in open sources: an institutional email address on the domain of their university, taken from the ROR registry of research organisations; their ORCID record; and their publications in OpenAlex. A moderator reads that evidence and makes the decision, and sets the fields in which the scientist may review.

Reviews in public

A verified scientist can review papers in their own fields. Every review is public and signed with the reviewer's name. It rates the paper on two scales adapted from the assessment model of the journal eLife: the significance of the findings, from useful to landmark, and the strength of the evidence, from inadequate to exceptional.

To keep reviews independent, the system will not let a scientist review their own paper, a paper by a co-author, a paper by someone at the same institution, or the work of someone who has reviewed them. We are also clear about what these reviews are not. They are expert opinions written in the open, not the peer review of a journal, and every paper page says so.

From review to the newsroom

When a reviewer rates the evidence at least solid and recommends a paper, it becomes a candidate for coverage. Our editors read every candidate. If they decide to write about it, the article links to the paper and the paper page links back to the article, so readers can always go from our reporting to the research behind it.

This is the part we care about most. Good research often waits a long time for a wider audience. Papers gives it a direct route to one, with a public record of who assessed it and how.

Connected to open science

Papers is built to work with the rest of the open research world rather than beside it. Paper pages carry the citation tags that Google Scholar uses. Retracted publications are recognised through Crossref and marked clearly. Profiles link to ORCID, Google Scholar, ResearchGate and OpenReview, and the whole collection is available to aggregators of open repositories through the standard OAI-PMH protocol.

Join the discussion

Alongside Papers, every article on Science Official now has a Discussion section. Reading it is open to everyone; writing in it takes a free account, the same one used for Papers. Readers can ask questions, add context and reply to one another, and our moderators look after the conversation.

Where to start

• Researchers: create an account and upload a paper.
• Scientists who would like to review: apply for verification.
• Everyone else: browse the papers, read how it works, and tell us what you think under any article.

Science Official Papers is new, and its shelves are still empty. We would be glad if yours was among the first papers on them.