FAIR Press Journals exists to make one change stick: that published science is as reproducible as its data allow. Where results can be rerun, they are, before the article earns its reproduction badge, and by anyone after. Where privacy stands in the way, we go as far as we can, with anonymised or synthetic twins, and still publish the work, clearly marked for what can and cannot be independently reproduced. It is fair along three axes: to the taxpayer, to authors, and to the researchers the fee systems leave behind.
Fair to the taxpayer
Most research is publicly funded. It should come back to the public open and rerunnable: reusable evidence, not paywalled claims. Everything we publish is open access under CC-BY, with code and data alongside wherever they can be shared, and results re-executed before publication whenever the data allow. Reproducibility is our default and our strongest signal, but not a barrier that turns away sound work bound by privacy.
Fair to authors
Authors get a fast, transparent decision, judged on soundness, not prestige or trend. Rigorous replications and null findings are welcomed on equal terms. Authors keep copyright. Review is AI-assisted and fully disclosed, and a named human editor signs every decision. You will know who read your work, and you can hold someone accountable for the verdict. Submission takes minutes, not an afternoon of form-filling. The system reads your manuscript and fills the forms, and you verify.
Fair to researchers the fee systems leave behind
Good, reproducible science must never fail because someone cannot afford a publication fee. Our baseline fee is low for everyone and waived where it would be a barrier, with a decision process that never sees payment status. We also do more than keep the fee low. For the best works we pay the authors a prize rather than charge them, and in a lower-income setting a few hundred francs can equal months of income. A waived fee and a paid prize are a real contribution to the researchers who need it most.
How we get there
- Verification built from experience. The AI in our review is not a generic model let loose. We define it in detail. The rules, the instructions, the system itself, an agentic suite that runs our own review skills and encodes two decades of editor-in-chief practice. It checks statistics, code, reproducibility and references, running to millions of tokens of analysis per submission.
- Feedback you can use. A minor or major revision comes with the full three-reviewer panel's reports for free. That is the substance authors need to improve the work. A desk rejection comes with a short letter developing the one decisive issue. The complete multi-reviewer report is then available to purchase for a small fixed fee.
- A human signature on every decision. Automation drafts, and a named editor decides and answers for it.
- Openness as preservation. CC-BY plus author-retained copyright plus independent deposits mean published work never depends on us to survive.
Who publishes the journal
FAIR Press Journals is an independent publisher, run by its founding editors as a Swiss company, FAIR Press Journals GmbH in Olten. It is not a charity and not part of a larger group. There is no submission fee and no reader subscription: the APC funds each article and sustains the company. Money also moves the other way. The strongest works of each volume are awarded a prize, so a paper can earn its authors money instead of costing them any. We run this to stay low-cost and durable, not to maximise margins. Authors keep their copyright, and every article is published under a CC BY licence.
The first title, the Journal of Reproducible Statistics, is open for submissions. Further journals follow the same system, same standards, own voice, as demand proves out. The commitments that bind every FAIR Press Journals title are on the policies page.