SciPost's Peer Review Method: Peer-Witnessed Refereeing.
Principles of SciPost's Peer-Witnessed Refereeing
Reporting
- Reports are gathered from editorially-invited referees, but can also be volunteered by registered SciPost Contributors during refereeing rounds.
- Reports are posted online (after rapid editorial vetting) on the Submission's Page, and can be rated, replied to (Authors only) or commented on by all Contributors.
- Anonymity is enforced at all meaningful stages (Reports and Comments have their own id and are not publicly linked to their Contributor when posted; all ratings are back-end-aggregated).
Ratings
- Ratings for Submissions, Reports and Comments determine the relevant Contributor's overall Ratings.
- A Contributor's Reporting, Replying and Commenting statistics (number, ratings) are publicly available.
Contributors thus have additional incentives to actively participate and provide not only high-quality Submissions, but also Reports and Comments of the highest achievable professional caliber (an online search form allows to retrieve back-end-aggregated statistics by performing a search by researcher's name).
Abusive behaviour is prevented by Editorial vetting of all Reports, Replies and Comments before public posting.
Motivations
Shortcomings of traditional refereeing
The traditional approach to refereeing is sub-optimal for a number of reasons: the choice of referees is exclusive to Journal editors; only up to a handful of referees are consulted; the best potential referees are not necessarily chosen; one cannot, as a specialist, volunteer to report on a paper (manuscript shortcomings are thus very often not flagged before publication); closed-door refereeing, with reports viewable only by editors and authors, is not fully accountable (referee reports are thus often of low quality); refereeing work is not credited (the quality of reports thus further suffers from a lack of incentive).
Submission and Refereeing procedure
Submission
To submit your article for publication in a SciPost Journal, you must:
- Make your preprint publicly available on arXiv
- After appearance on arXiv, fill the SciPost Submission form, choosing which SciPost Journal you wish to submit to.
Note that you cannot submit directly to SciPost Physics Select. Submissions to SciPost Physics Letters deemed of superlative qualty will be editorially promoted to SPS.
Refereeing procedure
The precise procedure differs slightly between SciPost Journals but follows this pattern:
- A SciPost Submission Page is activated for the Submission (this is similar to a Commentary Page, but with Reports also enabled). This page is immediately open to Contributor Comments and Author Replies.
- An Editor-in-charge starts a 3-week Refereeing round, inviting specific Contributors to provide an Invited Report.
- During a refereeing round, registered Contributors to SciPost can volunteer a Contributed Report.
- Authors can continuously provide Replies to Reports and Comments.
- At the end of the refereeing round, Reports, Replies and Comments are assessed by SciPost Editors, and an Editorial decision is taken.
- The Editorial decision consists in either a publication offer, request for resubmission (with minor revisions, or major revisions (leading to another refereeing round)), or rejection.
- The Authors can respond to the Editorial decision by accepting an eventual publication offer (in which case the Submission Page and its contents are moved to a SciPost Publication Page), by revising their manuscript and resubmitting to SciPost, or by withdrawing their Submission (in which case the Submission Page is deactivated and all its contents removed from public view).
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