In our peer-review process, the Handling Editor collects peer-review reports from the individual reviewers, then assembles it into a complete Assessment Report. This Assessment Report is posted on the EBT Community on Zenodo and discussed with the Authors as we come to a consensus on how to proceed with a submission.
If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask. Our processes are somewhat unique and may not be familiar to you, so please let us know if you have any concerns. We are here to help!
The Handling Editor will share with you a form that you should complete for your review. The form is fairly open-ended but there are some structures that help the Editor interpret your comments into feedback for the Submitting Authors, and we ask that you follow them.
These structures include dividing your comments into issues that impact the findings of the research vs. other issues that authors should nonetheless address, and answering three questions about the impact and options for handling any limitations you have identified in your review.
The form will ask you if you want to be anonymous or to sign your review. We recommend that you sign your review, in order (a) for you to be credited for your work, (b) simplicity, and (c) while we can take measures to ensure anonymity, we cannot guarantee it.
You will also have access to the Handling Editor’s Triage Report. This is provided for transparency, but we ask you not to use it as a guide to your review comments and instead approach the manuscript with the intent of providing comprehensive and independent review.
The Handling Editor will compile all reviewer comments into an Evaluation Report and post it on the EBT Community on Zenodo. If you requested to be recognised as one of the peer-reviewers, you will be listed as a contributor to the report in the bibliographic metadata of the Zenodo record for the evaluation. The Handling Editor will then share the report with the Submitting Authors.
If it is necessary to resolve disagreements between authors and reviewers on how to respond to reviewer comments, the Handling Editor will then arrange discussion of the Assessment Report with the Reviewers. This is done in a private channel on the Zulip platform.
This discussion is intended to result in a consensus between the Reviewers and Authors as to how best to proceed with revising the manuscript. The Authors will then proceed to make these revisions.
When the Authors have finished making their revisions, the Handling Editor will share with you the revised manuscript and a second form for you to complete. This form asks you how successful the Authors have been in responding to your comments.
As before, the Handling Editor will compile an updated Assessment Report and post it on Zenodo. If at this stage all issues have been resolved, the manuscript will be classified as an Accepted Contribution and published in the journal. If discussion is needed, Step 3 will be repeated.
If all issues have not been resolved, the Handling Editor will organise additional rounds of review depending on the level of revisions and satisfaction of the Reviewers with how the Authors have responded to their comments. A worst-case scenario would be that the Reviewer concerns cannot be addressed by the authors and the manuscript would be withdrawn. We hope this would be a rare occurrence.