Protocol Submissions - More Information

The EBT protocol assessment process evaluates a submitted protocol for demonstrating that, if followed, enough scientific work would be done that the relevant community (as represented by the peer-reviewers) would consider the planned study to be a unit of contribution to the scientific literature.

“Enough scientific work” means some combination of being a useful, valid contribution - not necessarily a large contribution, but at least something transparent and trustworthy that other researchers could potentially build on.

The first stage of assessment is Editorial Triage, where the Handling Editor assesses whether a protocol is yet ready for peer-review. This includes compliance checks with EBT’s open science and open data policies and a general judgement about whether peer-review is going to be sufficiently worthwhile for both the authors and the peer-reviewers.

At the triage stage, the handling editor is looking for missing information that prevents a manuscript being fully evaluated, and obvious errors, oversights, and logical issues with arguments that will unnecessarily inflate the number of rounds of peer-review.

Standards-compliant protocols go to peer-review, where usually three reviewers provide comments about how the protocol could or should be modified. The goal is to make the planned study the best contribution to the literature that it can realistically be. These comments are aggregated by the Handling Editor into an Evaluation Report.

If necessary, the authors, reviewers, and Handling Editor then discuss asynchronously the evaluation report, to come to consensus on the most appropriate way to revise the protocol. Revisions will include a combination of planning additional experimental work, modifying the data analysis plan, and revising how the research is described.

A revised protocol will be re-reviewed, further discussions held, and changes made, until the Handling Editor, authors, and peer-reviewers are satisfied that enough work has been done for the protocol to count as an Accepted Contribution to the literature. At this point the protocol is formally published in the journal.

Four our policy for what counts as a Registered Report, please click here.

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