in plain terms
What a pre-submission review is
The referee’s report, before the referee.
Peer review, before the peers.
A pre-submission review is what a careful referee would say about your manuscript, delivered before you submit it rather than months later. The reader owes you no favour: it weighs each claim against what the paper actually shows and against what earlier work has found, and says where the two disagree. The difference from the real thing is that you receive it in private, with time to act on it, and no editor ever sees it.
What is read, and how.
Five readers take the manuscript, each responsible for one thing: how the paper frames its question and contribution; the theory or argument it rests on; the logic that gets from evidence to conclusion; the data, design and results; and the writing. A sixth reads the whole manuscript from the first page to the last, as an editor would, and catches what falls between the five — a promise the introduction makes that nothing keeps, a number in the text that disagrees with a table. Every finding is then cross-examined against the paper before it reaches you, and what does not survive is dropped.
What you get back.
Comments anchored to the passages they are about, each with the problem, its consequence and a concrete suggestion; an overall assessment; and a score by dimension. You can ask the reviewer about any comment, or about the review as a whole, and argue back. Alongside the review: every reference checked against the record, a sentence-by-sentence language check, literature you may have missed, and suggestions for journals and for referees an editor might choose.
What it is not.
It is not a rewrite, and it does not make claims for you. It is not a guarantee of acceptance — no honest reader can offer that. And it is not a substitute for a colleague who knows your field; it is the reading you get at two in the morning, before you dare to ask one.
Who it is for.
Authors about to submit, who would rather hear about the weak paragraph now. Doctoral students without a second reader to hand. Editors screening what arrives. Anyone revising after a rejection who wants to know whether the referees were right.
What it costs.
Edyth is paid for in credits — one credit is one dollar at the list rate — and every account starts with ten. A standard deep review of an article of ten thousand words is seven to twelve credits; a light reading for an early draft, one to two; the most careful reading, for a manuscript about to go out, eighteen to thirty. A language check is two to six. Longer manuscripts cost proportionally more, and an estimate is shown before every run.
What becomes of your manuscript.
It trains nothing — not our models and not anyone's. It is seen by no one: the review is made by machines and read by you. It lives on guarded servers, and when you delete it, it is gone at once, with a receipt of what went.
The full price list is on the pricing page; what we promise about your manuscript, and the code that keeps the promise, is on the security page; the name, and why it was chosen, is here.