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Frequently asked questions
How submission, peer review, publication, access and contributor payments work. If something is not covered here, write to us.
Submitting
- What does it cost to submit?
- Nothing. There is no submission fee, no article processing charge, no colour charge and no page charge, at any stage.
- What do you publish?
- Original research, systematic reviews, methods papers, short reports, case studies and invited perspectives, across the natural, medical, computational and social sciences.
- How long does screening take?
- An editor reads every submission and decides within about five working days whether it goes to peer review. A decision not to proceed comes with written reasons.
- Can I ask you not to use a particular reviewer?
- Yes. List the addresses when you submit and we will honour the exclusion without asking why.
- Who owns the copyright?
- You do. You choose the licence at publication, from CC BY through to the Pensul standard licence.
Peer review
- How many reviewers assess a manuscript?
- We invite 5 to 10 specialists whose declared expertise matches the manuscript's subject areas, and who are not authors and have not been excluded.
- How long do reviewers get?
- 21 days from accepting. We chase reviewers, not authors, and you can see how many reports are in from your dashboard at any point.
- When do authors see the reports?
- Every report is released to the authors at the moment an editor records the decision, never mid-round. Confidential comments addressed to the editor are never shown to authors.
- Are reviewers named?
- Only if a reviewer chooses to sign their report. Anonymity is the default and carries no disadvantage of any kind.
- Who makes the decision?
- Editors, on the evidence of the reports. Reviewers recommend; they do not decide.
Reading and access
- How much does an article cost?
- Most articles are $12.00 to buy outright, and a purchase is permanent: the article stays in your library and remains downloadable. Some articles are open access and free to everyone.
- Is there a subscription?
- Yes, $29.00 a month for unlimited downloads across every subject area. Cancel any time; access runs to the end of the period you have paid for.
- Are abstracts free?
- Always. Abstracts, keywords, author details, the review timeline and the ISBN are readable by anyone, on every article.
- Is there an institutional plan?
- Not yet. Write to hello@pensul.com and tell us what you need.
Author and reviewer payments
- Are authors and reviewers paid?
- Yes. Revenue from a published article is shared with the people who produced and assessed it: 40% to its authors, 20% to the reviewers who filed reports on it, and 40% to Pensul, which runs the editorial process and maintains the archive.
- How long does that last?
- For the life of the article. There is no window, no cap, and balances do not expire.
- How is the author share divided?
- Equally between everyone listed on the paper by default. Co-authors with a Pensul account are credited automatically; the rest claim theirs by signing up with the email address on the submission.
- How does the subscription revenue reach anyone?
- It is pooled monthly and divided across articles in proportion to how often subscribers actually downloaded them. Each article's slice is then shared on the same basis as a single purchase.
- Does paying reviewers compromise their independence?
- Payment is tied to publication and readership, not to a verdict. A reviewer earns exactly the same whether they recommend acceptance or rejection. What they are not paid for is a report they never file, and editors, not reviewers, make the decision.
- When can I withdraw?
- Once your balance passes $50.00. Withdrawals are reviewed and released within three business days.
How a single purchase divides, at any price:
One download
$12.00
- Authors
- 40%
- $4.80
- Peer reviewers
- 20%
- $2.40
- Pensul
- 40%
- $4.80
Paid on every download, to every author and reviewer of the article, for as long as the article exists. Not an advance. Not a one-off honorarium.
The published record
- Do articles get a permanent identifier?
- Every publication is issued an ISBN at the moment it goes live. Identifiers are assigned sequentially and never reused.
- What happens if an article is retracted?
- It stays online with a retraction notice attached. Removing it would damage the record we exist to maintain. Sales stop immediately.
- How do I report a problem with an article?
- Write to ethics@pensul.com with the ISBN and as much specificity as you can manage. We tell the authors, investigate, and publish the outcome.
The formal terms
This page is a summary. The binding version is in the terms of service, and how we handle your data is set out in the privacy policy.