Review Slave is an open-access scholarly publisher for science: free to submit, free to read, peer-reviewed in the open, and funded by nothing but the goodwill of the researchers it has already served. No article-processing charges. No paywalls. No shareholders.
What we publish
Original research across the natural, physical, computational, and behavioural sciences, together with its complete, citable review record. Every accepted work is published under an open licence (CC BY 4.0 by default) with a permanent, versioned record of the peer review that vetted it. We are a wellness- and research-grade venue: published material is a review record, not medical advice.
How we are legitimate
Legitimacy in scholarly publishing is not a logo — it is a set of public, enforceable commitments. Ours are laid out in full and linked from every page:
- A transparent, structured peer-review process — signed and public by default, on the record.
- A COPE-aligned publication-ethics and malpractice statement, with mandatory conflict-of-interest disclosure and hard ethics/IRB gates on human- and animal-subjects research.
- Clear copyright and licensing — authors retain copyright; readers get open rights.
- An honest fees policy (there are none) and a plainly stated source of funding (voluntary patronage).
- A preservation and archiving commitment so the record outlives us, and a complaints and appeals process so it stays honest.
Ownership and management
Review Slave is operated as an independent, mission-locked scholarly publishing initiative, run by working scientists and editors. We take no advertising and sell no reader data. Our single, disclosed revenue source is voluntary patronage from researchers whose work succeeded after passing through open review — and patronage buys gratitude, never editorial influence.
Disclosure of the publisher's own interests. The founders of Review Slave also hold interests in commercial ventures outside this platform, including a company that manufactures and sells animal-wellness devices. We state this plainly rather than claim a purity we do not have. The controls that matter are structural, not declarative: any submission in which a founder, editor, or their company has an interest is marked with a competing-interest notice on its own page, its authors are recused in software from every editorial decision on it (not merely by promise), and it must be handled by an editor and reviewed by reviewers with no interest in the work. Where we cannot assemble that independence, we do not publish — we wait. Hold us to it: the review record of everything we publish is public, so the rigour of our reviews is itself open to review.
Editorial board
Review Slave is directed by an editor-in-chief and a founding editorial board of qualified, practising scientists across our subject areas, supported by a vetted volunteer review crew. In keeping with our privacy commitments during launch, individual board members are being confirmed and will be named, with affiliations, at first publication — the transparency standard we hold everyone else to, applied to ourselves.
Identifiers
Serial identifier (ISSN): registration in progress. Persistent article identifiers (DOIs) will be assigned to every published work and its review records once digital-identifier registration is complete. Author identity follows the ORCID standard.
Contact
Editorial and general: admin@thereviewslave.com. Ethics and misconduct: conduct@thereviewslave.com.