Blind Peer Review

For journals, the following publication policies are applied by THE UNIVERSITY ACADEMICS. The University Academics has fully blind peer review for all articles which means the names are not disclosed. We ask reviewers to sign their reports and declare any competing interests on any manuscripts we send them.

In addition, accepted research and analysis papers will usually have their prepublication history posted alongside them on IJEMS.

This prepublication history generally comprises all previous versions of the manuscript, the study protocol (mandatory for all clinical trials and encouraged for all other studies at The IJEMS), the report from the manuscript committee meeting, the reviewers’ comments, and the authors’ responses to all the comments from reviewers and editors. The prepublication history will be posted at the same time the paper is published and you can find it under the ‘peer review’ tab of an article. For rejected papers, we expect that authors will keep the identity and comments of peer reviewers confidential.

They may, however, share the peer review comments (though not peer reviewer names) in confidence with other journals. Authors should contact the editor who handled their paper if they have any complaints about the peer review process or the behaviour of the peer reviewers. Authors should not contact reviewers directly to discuss their reports; all queries should be directed through the editorial office.

As a reviewer you will be advising the editors, who make the final decision (aided by an editorial committee for all research articles and most analysis articles).

Reviewers will be informed of decisions by email. If we do not accept an article we will still pass on reviewer comments to the authors. You will remain the owner of the review you submit to us. It is your responsibility to ensure that you obtain the consent of any co-reviewer or other third party who may have contributed to your review. In submitting your review to The IJEMS you are agreeing to licence your work to us so that we may use it for the purposes outlined below.

If published, your review will be published under the same license as the article. An author’s manuscript must remain confidential until it is published, and you must not disclose any information about an unpublished manuscript, including your review. Please note that if the article is not published you may refer to the journal which requested your review and the fact that you have reviewed an article for it.

However, you may not post any details of the article which was reviewed, or any part of the review that would breach the confidentiality under which the article was provided to you for review. Authors are given the option of nominating other journals from THE UNIVERSITY ACADEMICS to which they would like their manuscript transferred to if it is rejected by The IJEM. If the author of the manuscript you reviewed has taken up this option, your review will be passed on to the editor of the nominated journal along with the manuscript and you might be invited to review a revised version.

If the article is accepted for publication in the other THE UNIVERSITY ACADEMICS journal, your review may also be published (depending on the editorial policy of the journal in question). You will be contacted for your permission before this happens. We provide a thank you email once your review is complete. We are not able to provide any additional documentation regarding your review.