Guidelines for Reviewers

Benefits of Frontier Scientific Publishing Volunteer Reviewers

Peer review is an essential part in the publication process, ensuring that Frontier Scientific Publishing maintains high quality standards for its published papers. Reviewing is often an unseen and unrewarded task. We are striving to recognize the efforts of reviewers.

When reviewing for Frontier Scientific Publishing journals you:

Receive a discount voucher code entitling you to a reduction in the article processing charge (APC) of a future submission to any Frontier Scientific Publishing Vouchers issued to specific individuals are not transferable and must be mentioned during the submission procedure. Please note reviewer vouchers must be applied before acceptance. Vouchers can no longer be applied once an APC invoice has been issued.
Are included in the journal’s annual acknowledgment of reviewers.
Are considered for the journal’s outstanding reviewer award.

Invitation to Review

Manuscripts submitted to Frontier Scientific Publishing journals are reviewed by at least two experts. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the external editor on whether a manuscript can be accepted, requires revisions or should be rejected.

We ask invited reviewers to:

accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on the manuscript title and abstract;
suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined;
request an extension in case more time is required to compose a report.

As part of the assessment, reviewers will be asked:

to ratethe originality, significance, quality of the presentation, scientific soundness, interest to the readers, overall merit and English level of the manuscript;
to provide an overall recommendationfor the publication of the manuscript;
to provide a detailed, constructive review report;

Potential Conflicts of Interests

We ask reviewers to inform the journal editor if they hold a conflict of interests that may prejudice the review report, either in a positive or negative way. The editorial office will check as far as possible before invitation, however we appreciate the cooperation of reviewers in this matter. Reviewers who are invited to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal should not consider this as a conflict of interest in itself. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let us know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

Confidentiality and Anonymity

Reviewers should keep the content of the manuscript, including the abstract, confidential. Reviewers must inform the Editorial Office if they would like a student or colleague to complete the review on their behalf.

Frontier Scientific Publishing journals operate single or double blind peer review. Reviewers should be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

Some journals offer authors the possibility to publish review reports with their paper and for reviewers to sign their open review reports, however this will only be done at publication with your express permission. If this is the case, it will be noted in the message inviting you to review. In all other cases, review reports are considered confidential and will only be disclosed with the explicit permission of the reviewer.

Note that, as the reviewer, you will have access to other reviewers' reports via the online submission system after you have submitted your report.

Timely Review Reports

Frontier Scientific Publishing aims to provide an efficient and high quality publishing service to authors and to the scientific community. We ask reviewers to assist by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please contact the editorial office if you require an extension to the review deadline.

Peer-Review and Editorial Procedure

All manuscripts sent for publication in our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts (this includes research and review articles, spontaneous submissions, and invited papers). The Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. We ask our authors for adequate revisions (with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is made. The final decision is made by the academic editor (usually the Editor-in-Chief of a journal or the Guest Editor of a Special Issue). Accepted articles are copy-edited and English-edited.

Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors.

Rating the Manuscript

Please rate the following aspects of the manuscript:

Originality/Novelty:Is the question original and well defined? Do the results provide an advance in current knowledge?
Significance:Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses and speculations carefully identified as such?
Quality of Presentation:Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of the results used?
Scientific Soundness:is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Are the data robust enough to draw the conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?
Interest to the Readers:Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the Journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited number of people? (please see the Aims and Scope of the journal)
Overall Merit:Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Do the authors have addressed an important long-standing question with smart experiments?
English Level:Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to Frontier Scientific Publishing journals should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:

Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.
For biological studies, the studies reported should have been carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical research standards.

If reviewers become aware of such scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should raise these concerns with the in-house editor immediately.

Overall Recommendation

Please provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript as follows:

Accept in Present Form: The paper is accepted without any further changes.

Accept after Minor Revisions: The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.

Reconsider after Major Revisions: The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point by point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. Usually, only one round of major revisions is allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.

Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper is rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors.

Review Report

Review reports should contain:

A brief summary(one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper and its main contributions.
Broad commentshighlighting areas of strength and weakness. These comments should be specific enough for authors to be able to respond.
Specific commentsreferring to line numbers, tables or figures. Reviewers need not comment on formatting issues that do not obscure the meaning of the paper, as these will be addressed by editors.

Note that Frontier Scientific Publishing journals follow several standards and guidelines, including those from the ICMJE (medical journals), CONSORT (trial reporting), TOP (data transparency and openness), PRISMA (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) and ARRIVE (reporting of in vivo experiments). See the Publishing Standards and Guidelines page or contact the editorial office for more details. Reviewers familiar with the guidelines should report any concerns they have about their implementation.

Your comments should not include an indication of whether you think the article should be accepted for publication. For further guidance about writing a critical review, please refer to the following documents:

COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. Committee on Publication Ethics. Available online.
Hames, I. Peer Review and Manuscript Management in Scientific Journals: Guidelines for Good Practice. Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, UK, 2007.
Writing a journal article review. Australian National University: Canberra, Australia, 2010. Available online.
Golash-Boza, T. How to write a peer review for an academic journal: Six steps from start to finish. Available online.

Frontier Scientific Publishing Review Reports Sharing

Reviewers may suggest that a manuscript may be more appropriate for publication in another Frontier Scientific Publishing journal. To save time and effort, authors would have the possibility to request the transfer of review reports to another Frontier Scientific Publishing journal. The full list of journals published by Frontier Scientific Publishing can be found in official website ,front-sci.com.