Chemistry Central Blog

A view from the inside: the peer-review process

As I mentioned last week, peer-review is a very important part of the publication process. Chemistry Central Journal uses an anonymous peer-review system, which means that authors do not know their reviewers’ identity. Chemistry Central Journal also uses an online peer-review system in order to speed up publication times. How long the peer-review process takes depends on the responsiveness of both reviewers and authors and whether the reviewers require minor or extensive revisions of the manuscript.

Our editorial board members play a key role in the peer-review process. They suggest appropriate reviewers for every manuscript and even, on occasion, act as reviewers themselves. The in-house team evaluates all reviewers suggested by our editorial board, and those selected are invited to review for us via the online system. Reviewers receive an email, with a link to a webpage that lets them tell us their decision. They are given a week to accept the invitation and those who do are then automatically sent another email with a link to the manuscript files and access to an online review form. Reviewers are asked to return their reports in three weeks.

We take reviewers’ comments very seriously and the content of these reports helps us to determine the fate of a given manuscript. On the other hand, we never make a decision about a manuscript based solely on a single report. We use the feedback of every report to help the author effectively revise his article and get it ready for publication. The report contains several sections that every reviewer must fill out.

General Comments
The reviewers use this section to write a short review of the article, which demonstrates their own understanding of the subject. Reviewers can also make any comments about the manuscript, positive or negative. To further clarify the importance of these comments, we ask reviewers to also fill out the following sections. 

Major Compulsory Revisions
These are revisions that the author must respond to before a decision on publication can be reached. These revisions typically mean that we go back to the reviewer for a re-review.

Minor Essential Revisions
These are suggested changes such as missing labels on figures, or the wrong use of a term. The in-house team checks that these changes have been made.  

Discretionary Revisions
These are suggestions, which the author can choose to ignore, if he feels that no change is needed.

What next?
The reviewer can suggest the next step for this article, whether a manuscript is ready for publication, needs major revisions, or should be rejected. Reviewers have a choice of:

    - Accept without revision

    - Accept after minor essential revisions

    - Unable to decide on acceptance or rejection until the authors have responded to     the major compulsory revisions

    - Reject as not of sufficient priority to merit publishing in this journal

Level of interest
The reviewer comments on whether this article is interesting enough to warrant publication.

Quality of written English
The reviewer has a chance to evaluate the standard of English used in the manuscript.

Statistical review
The reviewer can comment on the use of statistical analysis in a manuscript, if applicable. In some cases, we will bring in a statistician to review the statistical analysis of a manuscript, if other reviewers are unable to comment.

Confidential comment
Reviewers can also return separate confidential comments that the author will not see in the report, if there is some concern that the reviewer does not want the author to know about.

Our editors take into account the comments of all reviewers. One “reject” does not automatically mean a manuscript is rejected. Similarly, if two reviewers immediately return reports that tell us to “Accept without revision”, we generally seek the opinion of a third reviewer to make certain that the manuscript is ready for publication. Once the reviewers have turned in their reports, we send copies of each report to the author. If major changes or revisions are requested, then the author has to make the changes suggested and send a revised manuscript and a cover letter addressing each of the reviewers’ comments back for a re-review. Depending on the responsiveness of the author, this process can occur several times until the reviewers are satisfied. We typically allow authors two rounds of revision. Once all reviewers have unanimously decided to “Accept without revision”, the manuscript will be pre-accepted.

Posted by Andrea Albright at 14:10    Comments (0)