The Unjournal is a nonprofit I founded in 2022 and co-direct. We commission experts to publicly evaluate and rate research in economics, policy and other quantitative social science that seems relevant to global priorities: global health and development, animal welfare, catastrophic risks, the environment and AI.
It isn’t a journal. We don’t accept, reject or publish papers, and authors remain free to publish anywhere. We pick research that is already public (often working papers), pay expert evaluators, and publish their evaluations openly with DOIs. Each evaluation package usually has two or three evaluations, quantitative ratings with stated uncertainty, a summary from the evaluation manager, and the authors' response. Evaluators can sign their work or stay anonymous.
So far
- 55+ evaluation packages published, with 110+ expert evaluations: read them on PubPub
- Over $650k in grants, including from the Survival and Flourishing Fund ($565k, 2023), EA Funds ($40k for the Pivotal Questions pilot, 2024) and an initial ACX/Long-Term Future Fund pilot grant (2022)
- Pivotal Questions: workshops, models and forecasting built around questions that matter to funders (below)
- Research on research evaluation, including how frontier AI models compare with our expert evaluators: see Just Ask the Model (2026; work in progress, much of it generated by AI agents under our direction)
Pivotal Questions
A pivotal question starts from a decision rather than a paper. We work with funders and researchers to pin down a question whose answer would change what they do, connect it to the relevant research and our evaluations, ask experts for their beliefs before and after, and summarise the evidence for decision-makers. This is mostly my own work. I built much of the modelling, and the workshop and model pages, by prompting and orchestrating AI coding agents.
- Is cultivated meat commercially viable? The proposed question (2025), our evaluation of Rethink Priorities' forecasts and room for optimism? (2025), the workshop, modelling and resources (2026), the workshop page and working summary, an interactive cost model, and a Fermi modelling “hack” (2026).
- How much do plant-based products substitute for animal products? The question, with polls (2025), a follow-up on market share and taste (2026), the workshop page with its questions for elicitation, and Metaculus forecasts.
- Which wellbeing measures should guide global health and development priorities? An online workshop (March 2026): summary and transcript, readings, the pivotal questions and expert beliefs, and video highlights.
- Related: the Animal Futures Forecasting Tournament (2026, with Sentient Futures).
How Pivotal Questions started
We piloted the approach in 2024 with an EA Funds grant: see the launch post. Part of the motivation was funder feedback that evaluations should connect more clearly to real decisions. The Pivotal Questions page on The Unjournal’s site has the current list, and the workshop hub brings the workshops together.
Why
Peer review is great, but academic publication processes are wasteful, slow and rent-extracting, encourage gamesmanship, and discourage innovation. There’s a coordination problem in escaping this, but funders and researchers working on global priorities aren’t stuck: we can help coordinate an exit.
The binary “publish or reject” system wastes effort and adds unnecessary risk. Public evaluations and ratings offer an alternative. They make room for more readable, reliable and replicable formats, such as dynamic documents, and let research keep improving without “paper bloat”. Research organizations get feedback, quality control and external credibility without (only) going through traditional journals, and readers get open, citable assessments of how much to rely on a piece of work.
Links
- info.unjournal.org: main site
- unjournal.org: knowledge base, with how we work, policies and resources
- Evaluations on PubPub: all published evaluation packages
- Evaluations dashboard: interactive data on evaluations and ratings
- My EA Forum posts, many about The Unjournal’s evaluations and Pivotal Questions