Welcome to the OpenReview Blog: Building the Future of Scientific Peer Review Together

Andrew McCallum

We're thrilled to launch the official OpenReview blog! This is a momentous occasion for us, and we're excited to share our story, our mission, and our vision for transforming scientific communication through open, transparent peer review.

## **Our Story: From Vision to Reality**

OpenReview began in 2013 with a simple but powerful idea: peer review, the cornerstone of scientific progress, could be dramatically improved through openness and modern technology. Founded by Professor Andrew McCallum and his Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, OpenReview emerged from a recognition that traditional peer review practices—designed in the era of paper publishing and postal mail—were ripe for innovation.

Our origins trace back to the ICML 2013 Peer Review Workshop, where we published our foundational paper, "Open Scholarship and Peer Review: a Time for Experimentation." From those early days, we envisioned a platform that could serve as a **living laboratory for peer review experimentation**—a place where the scientific community could test different approaches to openness, explore new workflows, and discover what works best for different fields and contexts.

In January 2025, we took a major step forward by officially becoming a nonprofit organization, cementing our commitment to serving the scientific community and ensuring that peer review remains a public good, independent of commercial interests.

## **What We Do: Eight Pillars of Open Science**

OpenReview is more than just a platform—it's a comprehensive ecosystem for scientific communication built on eight core principles:

**Open Peer Review**: We provide a configurable platform that serves as a **testbed for experimenting with different approaches to peer review**. Conferences, journals, and workshops can explore various levels of openness—from fully transparent reviews with public author identities to traditional double-blind processes, and every gradation in between. This flexibility allows the scientific community to innovate, test new ideas, and discover what works best for different disciplines and contexts while addressing legitimate concerns about confidentiality, attribution, and bias.

**Open Publishing**: Our cloud-based infrastructure coordinates the complex workflows involving editors, reviewers, and authors, ensuring smooth operation whether you're managing a workshop with dozens of submissions or a major conference with thousands.

**Open Access**: Free access to papers for everyone, free paper submissions for authors. No fees. We believe knowledge should be accessible to all.

**Open Discussion**: We host accepted papers with their reviews and comments, providing a continued forum for discussion that extends well beyond acceptance. The conversation doesn't end at publication—it's just beginning.

**Open Directory**: Our comprehensive database of researchers includes conflict-of-interest information, institutional relationships, co-authorship networks, and advisor-advisee connections, ensuring fair and unbiased review processes.

**Open Recommendations**: Leveraging models of scientific expertise and topics, we help conferences match thousands of submissions with the most qualified reviewers, incorporating expertise modeling, bidding systems, and sophisticated balancing algorithms.

**Open API**: Our REST API provides programmatic access to people, papers, reviews, and workflow patterns, enabling venues to customize and automate their processes while maintaining robust permission models.

**Open Source**: We're committed to transparency at every level. Our web interface is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, and many other components are available on our GitHub organization. The code that powers openreview.net is open for all to examine, improve, and learn from.

## **Our Impact: Transforming Scientific Communication**

Today, OpenReview serves as the trusted platform for some of the world's most prestigious scientific venues. From **ICLR** (International Conference on Learning Representations), **NeurIPS** (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems), and **ICML** (International Conference on Machine Learning) to **CVPR** (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), **AAAI** (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), and hundreds of other conferences, workshops, and journals—OpenReview has become the backbone of modern scientific peer review, particularly in computer science and artificial intelligence.

We've processed hundreds of thousands of submissions, facilitated millions of reviews, and enabled countless scientific discussions that have advanced human knowledge. Our platform has made the peer review process faster, more transparent, and more collaborative than ever before.

## **Our Commitment: A Nonprofit Mission**

As of January 2025, OpenReview is officially a nonprofit organization, formalizing our longstanding commitment to independence and public service. This independence is crucial to our mission. We exist to serve science, not shareholders.

### Our Generous Sponsors

We're deeply grateful for the support of our [diverse community of sponsors](https://openreview.net/sponsors) who share our vision. Their backing—whether from academic institutions, research foundations, government agencies, or industry partners—enables us to maintain and expand this critical infrastructure for science. Each sponsor contributes to a future where scientific communication is more open, more efficient, and more equitable, while respecting the principle that no single entity should control the peer review process.

**Gold Sponsors:**
- Google
- UMass Amherst Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

**Silver Sponsors:**
- Meta
- Apple

**Bronze Sponsors:**
- Bloomberg
- IBM
- Amazon

**Benefactors:**
- Center for Data Science, College of Information & Computer Sciences (UMass Amherst)

**Large Patrons:**
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- Computer Vision Foundation (CVF)

**Medium Patrons:**
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
- Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Rolling Review (ARR)

**Small Patrons:**
- Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

These partnerships represent a unique coalition of technology companies, academic institutions, research foundations, and scientific organizations working together to advance open science. Their combined support ensures that OpenReview remains independent, sustainable, and focused on serving the needs of the research community.

## **Why We Need Your Support**

Running OpenReview requires significant resources. We maintain servers, develop new features, provide support to hundreds of venues, ensure security and reliability, and continually innovate to meet the evolving needs of the scientific community. While we partner with Code for Society for fiscal sponsorship and receive support from various organizations, sustaining and growing this critical infrastructure requires ongoing community support.

Your donation—whether you're an individual researcher who has benefited from our platform, an institution that values open science, or an organization committed to advancing scientific communication—helps us:

- **Maintain and scale our infrastructure** to serve growing numbers of venues and submissions
- **Develop new features** that improve the review process for authors, reviewers, and organizers
- **Provide free access** to all researchers, regardless of their institution's resources
- **Support smaller conferences and workshops** that might not otherwise afford review management systems
- **Innovate continuously** to address challenges in peer review, from bias detection to workload balancing
- **Ensure independence** so that scientific peer review remains a public good, not a commercial product

## **Join Us in Building the Future**

OpenReview represents more than a decade of work by dedicated researchers, developers, and supporters who believe in the power of open science. But we're just getting started. The challenges facing scientific communication—from ensuring reproducibility to combating bias to handling exponentially growing submission volumes—require continued innovation and investment.

**Please consider making a donation today** to support this critical infrastructure for science. Every contribution, regardless of size, helps us continue our mission of advancing science through improved peer review.

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## [**DONATE NOW →**](https://donate.stripe.com/eVqdR8fP48bK1R61fi0oM00)

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## **Stay Connected**

This blog will be your source for updates on OpenReview's development, best practices for venue organizers, insights from the peer review process, and stories from our community. We're excited to share our journey with you.

Thank you for being part of the OpenReview community. Together, we're building a more open, transparent, and collaborative future for science.

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*OpenReview is created by Andrew McCallum's Laboratory in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst, with nonprofit status and fiscal sponsorship through Code for Society.*

*Have questions? Want to use OpenReview for your venue? Visit our [documentation](https://docs.openreview.net) or check out our [GitHub organization](https://github.com/openreview).*