Peer Review & Editorial Policy

Peer review is the process used to evaluate and validate research before it is published. Independent experts assess a manuscript’s quality, accuracy and validity, and advise the editor who decides its fate.

This policy governs peer review for every journal managed on RevuMate AI by Consortium e-Learning Network Pvt. Ltd. and its partner imprints. It applies to editors, reviewers and authors alike, and it is the document the editorial office will be held to. Where an individual journal’s own instructions are stricter, the journal’s instructions apply.

Review is expected to deliver three things:

• Robustness — identifying gaps that need further explanation, additional experiments or a different analysis.
• Readability — flagging where the argument is hard to follow, so the work reaches the readers it is written for.
• Usefulness — weighing what the work actually contributes to its field.

Four principles sit behind everything below:

• Judgement belongs to people. Software can rank, screen, remind and record. It does not decide whether a paper is published.
• Confidentiality is the default. A manuscript under review is an unpublished document, and so is every report written about it.
• Decisions rest on the work. Not on the identity, nationality, institution, seniority or funding of its authors.
• Everything consequential is recorded, so a disputed decision can be reconstructed rather than remembered.

Every submission passes through the same eight stages.

1. Submission. The manuscript and its files are registered against the journal.
2. Preliminary screening. Editorial staff check scope, journal criteria and formatting. A manuscript may be returned for amendment or rejected outright at this stage, without review.
3. Reviewer assignment. Manuscripts that pass screening go to at least two independent reviewers, chosen for subject expertise, standing and reviewing record. Depending on the journal, two to four reviewers may be invited.
4. Review. Reviewers assess the work against the criteria the editor supplies — quality, methodology, results and conclusions — and submit a report with a recommendation.
5. Editorial decision. The handling editor decides. Where reviewer opinions diverge materially, the editor commissions a further review rather than casting the deciding vote themselves.
6. Communication. The decision and the anonymised reviewer comments go to the authors.
7. Revision. Authors are ordinarily given 10 to 15 days to revise. Revised manuscripts may go through further rounds of review.
8. Final checks. Formatting, journal standards and clarity are checked, with copyediting and proofreading before publication.

Review itself may take several weeks. We track time to decision, reviewer turnaround, reviewers per manuscript and rounds of revision, because a policy nobody measures is an aspiration.

There are three established models, each with a real trade-off.

Single-blind

Reviewers know who the authors are; authors do not know who reviewed them. Familiar and straightforward, but it leaves room for bias based on an author’s reputation, institution or nationality.

Double-blind

Neither party knows the other’s identity. It removes the most common source of bias, at the cost of making reviewer selection harder and anonymity imperfect in a small field.

Open

Reviewer identities are disclosed to the authors, and sometimes published. More transparent and accountable, but reviewers may hesitate to be named on contentious work, and authors may feel pressure to accept feedback they disagree with.

Double-blind review depends partly on the authors: removing names and affiliations from the manuscript file, anonymising self-citations and stripping identifying metadata from submitted files all help. Anonymity can never be guaranteed — a specialist field is small — and a reviewer who works out who the authors are must tell the editor if it creates a conflict.

Responsibility is divided deliberately, and the platform enforces the division rather than relying on convention.

• Commissioning editor. Owns a set of journals. Screens submissions, identifies and invites reviewers, follows up non-responses and approaches alternates, monitors progress, decides reviewer applications for their own titles, and makes or recommends the decision on each manuscript.
• Editorial manager. Oversees a group of commissioning editors, arbitrates where a reviewer or author disputes a handling decision, and countersigns review certificates.
• Administrator. Maintains journals, accounts and templates. Does not make editorial decisions.
• Reviewer. Provides the independent assessment. Recommends; does not decide.

These boundaries are enforced on the server, not merely hidden in the interface: a role that cannot see a journal’s manuscripts cannot retrieve them by any route. An editor who is an author on, or otherwise conflicted over, a submission to their own journal must hand it to another editor, and the handover is logged.

Reviewers are drawn from the journal’s own panel, from past reviewers and board members, from reviewers empanelled on related titles, and from applications received through public registration. Editors weigh subject fit, independence from the authors, past turnaround and current workload.

Authors may suggest reviewers, or ask that a named person be excluded. Editors will consider both and are bound by neither; a suggested reviewer is checked for independence like any other.

Every report is expected to meet these, and an editor may return one that does not.

• Objectivity. Judge on scientific merit, not personal belief or preference.
• Competence. Review only within your expertise, and say what you could not assess.
• Confidentiality. Do not disclose the work or the authors’ information without consent.
• Timeliness. Deliver by the agreed date, or say early that you cannot.
• Constructive feedback. Strengths, weaknesses and what would improve the work — specific enough to act on.
• Adherence to standards. Check methodology, ethical compliance and the absence of plagiarism.
• Transparency. Disclose conflicts of interest, and any prior involvement with the work.

What a report must cover, and the scores and recommendation it carries, are set out in the Reviewer Guidelines.

A submitted manuscript is disclosed only to those who need it: the handling editor, the editors overseeing them, the invited reviewers, and administrative staff to the extent their work requires. It is not shared with anybody else without the corresponding author’s written consent.

• Reviewers are bound by section 4 of the Reviewer Guidelines — no circulation, no use, no retention, and no putting any part of a manuscript into a public AI tool.
• Reviewer identities are withheld from authors indefinitely, including after publication, unless the journal operates open review or the reviewer asks in writing to be named.
• Reports are the property of the journal for the purposes of the editorial process. We may share a report with another reviewer on the same manuscript, with an editor handling an appeal, or with an institution conducting a misconduct investigation.
• Nothing about an unpublished submission is confirmed to a third party — not even that it exists.

Everyone involved declares; the editor above them decides. The test is whether a reasonable reader, knowing the facts, might doubt the impartiality of the decision.

Reviewers

Must decline where any of the circumstances in section 5 of the Reviewer Guidelines applies — shared institution, co-authorship within five years, close personal association, a financial interest, or direct competition on the same question.

Editors

Must hand over any manuscript on which they are an author, a collaborator, or otherwise interested. A submission from an editor to their own journal is handled end to end by a different editor, who has no visibility of the submitting editor’s view of it.

Authors

Must disclose funding sources, competing financial interests and any relationship a reader might reasonably want to know about when weighing the work.

Every submission is screened before it reaches a reviewer. Screening checks scope, completeness, formatting, ethical approvals where applicable, and textual overlap with the published literature. Authors are required to provide a statement of originality and to disclose prior or concurrent submission.

A similarity check is run and the result is recorded on the manuscript itself. A similarity score is an indicator, not a verdict: a high score may be nothing more than a standard methods paragraph or a correctly quoted passage, and a low score does not establish originality. An editor reads the matched passages before drawing any conclusion.

A manuscript may be returned without review where it is out of scope, plainly incomplete, fails a required ethical approval, or shows overlap the editor judges to be plagiarism or redundant publication. The authors are told which applies.

Reviewers recommend; the editor decides. The decision is not a tally of the recommendations, and an editor may depart from them where the reasoning in a report does not support its conclusion. Where an editor’s decision differs from the reviewers’ advice, they explain why to both the authors and the reviewers.

• Accept — published in its current form.
• Minor revisions — accepted subject to small changes, with no further round of review.
• Major revisions — significant changes required, followed by another round of review, ordinarily with the original reviewers.
• Reject — significant flaws, or a poor fit with the journal’s focus. The letter distinguishes the two, because the second is not a criticism of the research.

Authors receive the decision with the reviewers’ reports attached, anonymised. Comments marked for the editor alone are not passed on. Reports that are abusive, or that disclose a reviewer’s identity against the journal’s model, are returned to their author for rewriting before they go anywhere.

Authors may appeal a decision once. Write to info@stmjournals.com within 30 days, quoting the manuscript reference, and set out specifically what in the reports or the handling you say is mistaken. A general disagreement with the outcome is not a ground of appeal.

1. The appeal goes to an editorial manager who was not the handling editor.
2. They may uphold the decision, return the manuscript for further review, or commission an additional report.
3. We aim to answer within 30 days, and will tell you if it will take longer.
4. The manager’s decision closes the matter.

Complaints about conduct rather than outcome — delay, discourtesy, a suspected breach of confidentiality, a conflict that should have been declared — go to the same address and are handled by somebody outside the chain complained of.

Concerns raised after publication are investigated whoever raises them, including anonymously. We follow the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and we do not treat a matter as closed because the paper is already out.

• Correction. For an error that does not affect the findings or the conclusions. The record is amended and the correction linked to the article.
• Expression of concern. Published where an investigation is unresolved, inconclusive or outside our power to complete, so readers are not left relying on the paper in the meantime.
• Retraction. For findings that are unreliable — through error or misconduct — or for plagiarism, redundant publication, unethical research or fabricated data. The article stays online, clearly marked, because removing it would hide the record rather than correct it.

Authors are told of a concern and given a reasonable opportunity to respond before anything is published. Where misconduct is alleged, we may refer the matter to the authors’ institution or funder, which is ordinarily better placed to investigate than a publisher is.

The platform keeps the editorial record so a decision can be examined later rather than reconstructed from memory: invitations and their answers, reviewer reports and scores, decisions and who made them, every message sent to a reviewer or author, and an audit log of consequential administrative actions. Access follows the roles in section 4; retention is set out in our Privacy Policy.

We review this policy periodically and update it as practice and publishing standards change. The date at the top of this page is the date of the current version, and a manuscript already in review continues to be handled under the version in force when it was submitted.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about the handling of a specific manuscript: