Peer review is the foundation of quality in research for both books and journals, ensuring that published research is rigorous and ethical. Peer reviewers can access a number of resources to assist them with their peer reviewing duties:
- How to peer review journal articles: a practical introduction to conducting peer reviews, especially for those who are new to the process
- Ethics in peer review
- Online peer review systems, and how to anonymously annotate manuscripts
- Peer review FAQs
The journal administrator is also happy to help with any queries regarding undertaking peer review assignments. Please contact the Editorial Office with any questions.
Open peer review
Quantitative Plant Biology will operate 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. Accepted manuscripts will be published with their review reports; these reports may include the reviewer name and their ORCID ID if the reviewer opts to publish these, and each report 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 Alison Paskins (Publisher): alison.paskins@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.
Before writing your review you may find it helpful to browse our Instructions for authors.
·We need you to agree to having your review published online, and to make it available under a CC-BY open access licence. You will need to decide whether you would like your name to be published alongside your review, or whether you would prefer to remain anonymous.
·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”.
·The Comments to the Author section enables you to detail points that require amending/clarification. These comments will be published online and as Quantitative Plant Biology is open peer review, authors will be able to read your review. If you opt to have your name published alongside your review they will also be able to see who has reviewed their work. Therefore, please do not make any comments that you do not wish the author (or the whole community) to see.
Peer reviewers are expected to return their reviews within two weeks. 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 Quantitative Plant Biology 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.
Becoming a Quantitative Plant Biology reviewer
If you would like to become a reviewer for Quantitative Plant Biology, please register at the journal’s ScholarOne site.
Reviewer registration
If you would like to be considered as a peer reviewer for this journal, register here to be included in our reviewer database.
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.