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Lately, I have been having trouble sleeping. There is something on my mind, something that I have been putting off for weeks and is long overdue. It is not what you might think. I have not missed a grant deadline, forgotten an important experiment, or put off preparing my final exam questions. I am ashamed to admit it, but I have been neglecting my peer-review duties. Yes, I am one of those culpable academics who click on the “I agree to review this manuscript” link and then need constant pestering, reminders, and extensions from journal editors to get the job done. Not only am I falling behind on my commitments as a reviewer, I am reviewing far too few papers given my annual publication output. But I am also not the only one failing to follow through with peer review. Many of my colleagues struggle with these same problems. They are overextending themselves, and the first things they drop are their peer-review obligations. Making matters worse is the ever-growing number of online academic journals and the escalating rate of publication. Indeed, the global scientific output is doubling about every 9 years (Bornmann and Mutz 2015), leading to an increasingly competitive publishing environment, more strain on editors and reviewers, and greater expectations from authors—“You promised a first decision in 30 days or less.” One journal responded to these pressures by creating a two-tier publishing system: Earlier this year, papers submitted to Scientific Reports, which is owned by the Nature Publishing Group, could be fast-tracked through peer review if authors made an additional payment beyond the standard fee (Cressey 2015). After harsh criticism from the scientific community, the journal eventually removed this option. Sometimes, those who fall short of their peer-review responsibilities are the first to complain when it is their papers being held up in the queue. Admittedly, I have been waiting for more than 6 months to get the first round of reviews for one of my own manuscripts and have sent multiple e-mails to the journal and associate editor trying to expedite the review process. A former collaborator of mine was ferocious with editors when his papers sat in limbo for too long. But he once confided to me that he rarely had time to review papers for journals, and when possible he had the editors pass the manuscripts on to his students or postdocs so that they could gain review experience. Another factor impeding peer review is that, apart from a sense of scientific and moral duty, there are relatively few rewards for refereeing a paper—although when the papers are well written and the science is well done, it is an excellent way to stay abreast of cutting-edge research. Moreover, a high-quality review can take hours, even days, to perform, and in most cases, the referees remain anonymous and, thus, get little direct credit from their colleagues or employers for all of that hard work, with the exception of adding another notch to the “external service” sections of their curricula vitae. If more scientists are in fact shirking their peer-review responsibilities, what can be done to rectify the situation? One option is to give researchers, academic institutes, and the scientific community as whole greater incentives for reviewing papers. This is exactly what the creators of Publons have in mind. Founded in 2013, Publons is a free online social media service that lets users record, share, and showcase their peer-review activities. The service is based on the hypothesis that “when reviewers get official recognition for their work, they are more willing to accept review requests, more willing to prioritize time to do the review quicker, and more likely to do a comprehensive review” (www.publons. com). Like other academic social media platforms, such as ResearchGate, Publons provides its members with various scholarly metrics and an overall score, which they can use to compare themselves with other members and add to promotion or grant applications. But unlike ResearchGate, Publons does not reward its users for the number and impact of published papers; instead, it ranks users (and institutions) on the basis of the number of papers they have peer reviewed. Adding both recent and past reviews to a Publons profile is straightforward and includes a formal verification step in which users forward their review receipts—that is, the “thank you for reviewing” emails—to Publons. Once a review is added, only the journal and the month of the review are shown, and all other identifying information remains hidden from the public, unless the user chooses to share it. Members can also endorse the posts of other members—the more endorsements you garner, the greater your overall score. With more than 8000 “Publon” points, Jonas Ranstam, a medical statistician from Sweden, is currently the highest-ranked peer reviewer at Publons, and Harvard tops the website’s university leaderboard. BioScience Advance Access published March 6, 2016