For authors

Get your work on the Ledger

academic Ledger certifies scholarship; it does not distribute or host it. Here is how to get a new paper on the ledger and rated.

We certify; we don’t host

Academic publishing bundles two jobs that don’t belong together: distribution — getting the work out — and certification — judging how good it is. Distribution is already solved; anyone can post a paper today. academic Ledger does only the second job: it computes QaL, a calibrated estimate of a paper’s eventual standing, over the open scholarly record. We point to the canonical record of your work; we never host or archive it ourselves.

How to get listed now

Post your working paper to an open repository that mints a DOI and is indexed in the open scholarly record. Once it’s there, the Ledger can find, index, and rate it — no submission to us required. Good options:

SSRN — economics, finance, management, law, and the social sciences; mints DOIs (the 10.2139/ssrn.* prefix) and is well indexed.
arXiv — physics, math, CS, and quantitative fields; indexed directly.
Zenodo — any discipline; mints a permanent DOI (run by CERN, free).
OSF Preprints — any discipline; DOI plus hosting.
bioRxiv / medRxiv — biology and medicine.
Your institutional repository — most mint DOIs and are indexed.

The common thread is a DOI in the open record — that’s what lets the Ledger find and rate the work, whichever repository you choose.

What happens next

Once your paper is in the open record (via OpenAlex, our data spine), the Ledger indexes and rates it automatically. A brand-new paper has no citations yet, so its QaL starts as an honest, wide, illustrative estimate and sharpens as real evidence accrues. You’ll be able to find it here by DOI or title.

Distribution is solved. Post your work where the open record can see it, and the Ledger does the rest.

A fast-track, later

We may eventually offer an ORCID-verified fast-track: deposit a new paper, mint a DOI (via a service such as Zenodo), and list it on the Ledger immediately, ahead of the open feeds. It isn’t built yet — for now the repository route above is the way in, and it keeps us in our proper place: an overlay on the record, never a host.