Penelope

Penelope.ai is a manuscript compliance service for scientific publishing. Its job is narrow and useful: before a paper reaches a human reviewer, confirm that it actually satisfies the journal's own author guidelines. Journals define dozens of rules — does an ethics statement section exist and is it in the right place, is the review board named, is informed consent addressed, are conflict of interest and data sharing declarations present, does the abstract follow the required structure, do the figure and table mentions match their legends, are citations and references consistent, does the article exceed the word limit, has the author left track changes in the file.

Penelope runs those rules automatically and reports back with links into the marked-up manuscript, so nothing is a black box. Every check's pass and fail criteria are documented, which matters for editorial transparency and for authors who may query a result. Journals configure which of the 30-plus checks apply, which failures are critical, and precisely how feedback should be phrased to editors and authors. Results can appear at a summary level inside the manuscript handling software or as a full annotated interactive report.

The commercial model is per-journal rather than per-writer. Pricing scales with annual submission volume and includes the complete suite of checks and metadata extraction, with the option instead to offer author-paid checks at no cost to the publisher. Penelope is based in London, UK, and is available to journals using Manuscript Manager, with waiting lists for Editorial Manager and ScholarOne.