Hi all! Does anyone know of such a thing? I've googled it, but I'm slightly leery of the results - a lot seem to be euphamising 'peer review' for 'we'll write your stuff for you', degree mill kind of thing, also known as, err, fraud!

But having written something, I'd quite like to submit it for an informal PR to determine whether it's worth submitting it officially. Any advice would be much appreciated!

I'd think the general advice would be to submit it for, er, peer review.

You're second-guessing yourself a bit too much if you think you need a paid-for, additional peer review in advance. It surely can't be *so* bad you'll be laughed out of the park and forever damned to academic unemployability as a result of everyone word-of-mouth saying 'so-and-so wrote such a bad paper! lol!', right? :)

That might be the phobia in the back of your mind, but it's an irrational one. I think you're hitting a lot of dodgy links searching, because it's not really a done thing to have a paper peer-reviewed for money before having it peer reviewed by a venue, and good academics in general, as far as I know(!), are not signed up to provide 'pre-peer-review-for-money' services, meaning you're rightly skeptical of any service claiming to provide this. I mean, you're already basically offering the venue/journal free money by signing over the publication rights on your work. The whole purpose of what they do should be to be to provide an objective and useful peer review in return.

Professionally proofread, perhaps, if you're really skeptical about your ability to write and need someone to fix the typos, but (particularly if that's related to something like dyslexia), that's really something your institution/manager should be helping with.

I'm thinking the root of this is a confidence issue, not an issue with your (potential) submission. It may well get rejected with comments, but that's in many ways the purpose of the exercise, and will in the worst-case be considerably cheaper and more legitimate than asking someone who's willing to do it for money what they think first.

abababa, thanks very much for that detailed reply, and belated apologies for my delayed response-the forum is a little quiet these days, so Iforgot to check-in. Sorry to underestimate you, forum!

I think you are dead right in all your assumptions. I find the construction, and organisation of papers very tricky, so I assumed it would get thrown back before even being read. But I also see unnecessary problems... as you've just pointed out. That's really useful advice - and also encouraging. Thanks a lot!