How Quorum works
Quorum: An Open Journal of Information Technology is a free, open access journal for information technology research. Nobody pays to read and nobody pays to publish. The currency is peer review: you review other people's work to earn the right to have yours reviewed.
The review credit economy
Every scholar has a credit balance. Submitting a manuscript costs 1 credit. Writing your first complete review of a manuscript earns 1 credit. Credits cannot be bought, sold or transferred, and no money is involved at any point.
Each paper needs 3 reviews, so each submission creates work that earns 3 credits for the community. That is how the journal grows: every paper funds the next ones.
Re-reviewing a revised version is part of the commitment you make when you accept an invitation. It raises your reputation but does not earn an additional credit. If you withdraw your submission before any reviewer has submitted a review, the credit is refunded.
The journal opens with a genesis block: the Genesis Collection. The editors invite up to 20 scholars to submit without a credit, starting with the founding editor's article. Genesis papers go through exactly the same double-blind review by 3 scholars, and a rejected genesis paper is simply rejected. Those 20 papers need 60 reviews, which mint the credits that fund the next wave of submissions. After the genesis block, every submission is paid for with a credit earned through review.
From submission to publication
- Automatic checks. The system validates the PDF, abstract length (100–400 words), keywords (3–8), author details and ORCID iDs, and rejects duplicate files.
- Reviewer matching. Only scholars who share the paper's subject area or at least one of its keywords are invited at first. They are ranked by topical fit, reputation and current workload. People at the same institution as any author, co-authors, anyone the authors asked to exclude (up to 3), and anyone already involved with the paper are left out. The system invites 3 reviewers plus 1 spare.
- Invitations. Invited reviewers have 4 days to accept or decline, with a reminder 48 hours before the deadline. Declined or expired invitations are replaced right away. When 3 have accepted, spare invitations are withdrawn.
- Review. Reviewers have 21 days for the first round (14 days after a major revision, 7 after a minor one). A reminder goes out 3 days before the deadline. A review more than 5 days late is cancelled and a new reviewer is invited.
- Decision. When the last review arrives, the decision is made instantly using the rules below.
- Revision. Authors have 60 days for a major revision and 30 days for a minor one. The same reviewers check the revision. A paper can go through at most 3 rounds.
- Publication. Accepted authors have 7 days to upload a camera-ready PDF with names restored. Then the article is published automatically with a permanent identifier such as Quorum.2026.0001.
When reviewers are hard to find
Every paper that is short of reviewers follows the same timeline, counted from the day the search starts:
| Day 0 | Close matches only: same subject area or a shared keyword. |
| Day 7 | Matching widens to related areas (invitations are labelled “broader match”). The paper appears anonymously on a Papers needing reviewers page for scholars in related areas, who can volunteer, and up to 25 of them are emailed. |
| Day 14 | The author receives a status update. |
| Day 30 | The author may withdraw and get the submission credit (or genesis invitation) back, or keep waiting while the search continues. |
New scholars are members as soon as they sign up. Their email address is confirmed by the link we send, or by accepting their first review invitation from its email; until then they receive one invitation at a time. Reviewers can decline with a reason. “Not my area” makes future matching to that subject area less likely. If 3 invitations in a row expire without any answer, new invitations pause for 30 days, so papers are not held up. The scholar can resume with one click at any time.
Decision rules
Each reviewer recommends accept, minor revision, major revision, or reject. The recommendations are combined like this, in order:
| If | Then |
|---|---|
| A majority recommend reject | Reject |
| Every reviewer recommends accept | Accept |
| It is the final round (3) and nobody asks for reject or major revision | Accept |
| It is the final round and major concerns remain | Reject |
| Any reviewer recommends reject or major revision | Major revision |
| Otherwise (a mix of accept and minor revision) | Minor revision |
Authors see the rationale and all reviewer comments as soon as a round is decided. Nothing is hidden behind an editor's discretion.
Keeping reviews honest
A system that pays in credits has to guard against lazy reviews. Several mechanisms work together. Reviews must score five criteria and contain at least 150 words of comments for the author (a third of that for re-reviews). Authors rate each review's helpfulness after the decision, which feeds the reviewer's reputation. Editors can flag a review as low quality, which revokes its credit and costs 20 reputation points. Reputation decides who gets invited first, so careless reviewers simply stop receiving invitations.
With the authors' consent, the anonymized review reports are published next to the article. Knowing that a review may become public is a strong incentive to write a good one. Reviewers can choose to sign their reports.
Double-blind review
Reviewers do not see author names and authors do not see reviewer names. Authors must remove names, affiliations, acknowledgements and obvious self-citations from the review PDF. The named version is uploaded only after acceptance. See how to anonymize your manuscript for step-by-step instructions.
Reviewer code of conduct
- Decline if you have a conflict of interest: same institution, collaboration in the last three years, a personal relationship, or directly competing work.
- Keep the manuscript confidential. Do not share it, cite it, or use its ideas before publication.
- Do not upload manuscripts to AI services that retain or train on the content.
- Be specific and constructive. Criticize the work, not the authors.
- Meet the deadline, or decline early so someone else can help.
- Report suspected plagiarism, fabrication or ethical problems in the confidential comments.
Scope
The journal covers the application, management and study of information technology: systems as they are built, deployed, secured and used in organizations and society. Subject areas:
Open access, license and indexing
All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Authors keep copyright. Anyone may read, download, share and build on the work with attribution.
Every article page carries the Highwire Press metadata that Google Scholar requires, Dublin Core tags, and schema.org structured data. The journal publishes a sitemap, an RSS feed, and an OAI-PMH endpoint so repositories and aggregators such as BASE, CORE and OpenAIRE can harvest it.
The role of editors
The journal runs without handling editors. Editors receive one weekly digest: papers still looking for reviewers, flagged reviews, and subject areas that need more reviewers. A small editorial board watches for abuse: spam or out-of-scope submissions (which they can desk reject with a written reason), low-quality reviews, and gaming of the credit system. Every editorial action is logged in the submission's timeline.
Editors may publish in the journal. When they do, the system blocks them from the editorial view of their own paper, including reviewer identities, and bars them from taking any editorial action on it. Reviewers are chosen by the matching system as for any other paper. The published article carries an editorial note that says so. Editors also cannot adjust their own credit balance or send themselves genesis invitations.
Funding
No author and no reader ever pays. The journal's running costs are small and are covered by donations. See Support the journal for the cost breakdown.