Standing is earned here —
and standing opens the door.

Scientific scholarship is more than publications and citations. A tier reflects what a researcher contributes here — reviews, discussion, triage, journal clubs — not external rank. It cannot be bought, and it does not arrive with a title.

Every tier above Reader now asks for a compound record of service: sustained discussion, and real acts of judgment, and steady triage of the literature. No single gesture reaches it. The two quiet tiers (Reader, Contributor) read in grayscale; Scholar and Curator stand out as marks of recognized contribution.

A tier is not a badge for showing up. It is the community’s memory of what you have done for it.

Criteria combine with and — every line must hold. Reviews count whether named or anonymous, and they are expected to be in line with the community’s calibration (scoring out of the park). Standing is recomputed nightly. Each tier grants invitations — on attainment, and again for every 90 days it is held.

Attaining a tier holds it for 90 days. Keep meeting the bar and the clock resets every night. Fall below it, and when the 90 days run out you step down exactly one tier — never further in a single step — and a fresh 90-day clock starts where you land.

Scholar and Curator also ask for recent presence: activity within the last 20 days. The work itself is never removed — only the standing it supports lapses, and any night you meet the bar again, standing returns. An editorial appointment is not withdrawn by the nightly recompute.

Holding your highest tier through a full year earns an annual badge, issued December 31 — a visible streak of scholarship, year over year, on your profile.

Several criteria above say “in line with the community’s calibration.” Here is what that means. Review scores are a shared instrument: a score far outside what a paper’s other reviewers found — in either direction — is a claim that everyone else read it wrong. Sometimes that claim is right. Papers are occasionally much better, or much worse, than the first crowd believes, and the honest outlier review is exactly what this platform exists to protect.

But the distance should be spent thoughtfully. Where a score sits more than two standard deviations from a paper’s mean once more than five reviews are in, the editorial team may take a look — not to punish disagreement, but to ask whether the review carries the reasoning to back the distance. Reviews that repeatedly land far outside calibration, without the reasoning, can cost standing.

You can score a paper out of the park. You should have to think before you do.