Open Peer Review

QRB Discovery operates open peer review for full transparency about decision-making and in order to mitigate issues that contribute to editorial bias, and to enable reviewers to collect their contributions as part of their academic record. Reviewers are named and they are asked for agreement when posting their comments on the field box on Editorial Manager. Accepted manuscripts will be published with their signed review reports; these reports will be assigned an individual DOI. 

Open peer review does not mean that reviewers should contact authors directly, or that authors should contact reviewers. All queries should be directed through the editorial assistant Lynet Smith (lsmith@cambridge.org).

Guidance for peer reviewers

If we need your help with reviewing a manuscript, we will email you and ask you to accept or decline the invitation through our submission site. If you accept, you will be asked to submit your report in a field box in Editorial manager. You will not be able to attach or upload any documents. 

Before writing your review you may find it helpful to browse our Instructions for authors. 

- We need your agreement to have you review published online with your name associated, and to make it available under a CC-BY open access licence.

- You will also need to sign the Conflict of Interest declaration, and detail any competing personal, professional or financial interests that could be perceived as an influence on evaluating the work under review, or confirming that no such competing interests exist by entering the response “Reviewer declares none”.

- Example wording for a Conflicts of Interest declaration is as follows: “Reviewer is employed at company B/owns shares in company D/ is on the Board of company E/is a member of organisation F/ has received grants from company H.” If no Conflicts of Interest exist, the declaration should state “Reviewer declares none”.

- We need you to recommend a decision for the paper.

- The Comments to the Author section enables you to detail points that require amending/clarification. These comments will be published online and as QRB Discovery is open peer review, readers will see these comments. Therefore, please do not make any comments that you do not wish the author (or the whole community) to see. There is a suggested limit of 500 words for this section to encourage succinct and informative reviews.

As QRB Discovery aims to be a fast publication journal, we are recommending that reviews be returned within ten days where possible. Please do let us know if you need extra time, or if you are unavailable so that we can approach alternative reviewers.

We ask reviewers to help us ensure that experiments published in QRB Discovery are scientifically credible and ethical. Reviewers should judge whether the experiment was well conducted and designed, and the data is valid. The editorial team will make the final decision to accept or reject a manuscript, based on the reviewers’ comments.

Peer Review Terminology

QRB Discovery and Cambridge University Press are participating in a pilot of STM's Working Group on Peer Review Terminology. 

Background statement: "STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, has recognised a need to identify and standardise definitions and terminology in peer review practices in order to help align nomenclature as more publishers use open peer review models. A peer review terminology that is used across publishers will help make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent, and will enable the community to better assess and compare peer review practices between different journals."

Terminology for QRD Discovery:

• Identity transparency (during peer review process itself): Single anonymized
• Reviewer interacts with: Editor
• Review information published: Review reports, Reviewer identities

We would welcome your feedback on the Peer Review Terminology Pilot - please can you take the time to fill this short survey’

Becoming a QRB Discovery reviewer

If you would like to become a reviewer for QRB Discovery, please register at the journal’s Submission site.

Resources 

Introductory resources for peer reviewers can be found on Cambridge Core here.

Ethics

Guidance on ethical peer review can be found on Cambridge Core here.