It claimed that over 3,000,000 researchers joined the site, adding more than one million reviews across 25,000 journals.

[4] Publons produced a verified record of a person's review and editorial activity for journals, which could be downloaded to include in CVs, funding and job applications, and promotion and performance evaluations.

[6] Publons was founded by Andrew Preston and Daniel Johnston to address the static state of peer-reviewing practices in academic research publishing, in view of encouraging collaboration and speeding scientific development.

Publons has partnerships with many publishers[9] and with related services such as Altmetric[citation needed] and ORCID.

[12] TechCrunch remarked that lack of transparency leads to many problems in the publication process, and Publons purports to help with that.