1. Selection criteria for peer reviewers

2. Peer reviewing guideline or format (if you send it with the article)

3. Managing peer reviewers

And any other information related to peer reviewers.

Angel Magar
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Nearly everything goes through peer review, except letters to the editor and book reviews, generally.

Try doing an Internet search for “Peer Review Form” and see if you get some examples.

You can manage peer review over e-mail and manually if the journal is small—300 or less papers each year. Once you grow larger than that, you will need an Internet-based system. There was a similar query a few weeks ago on WAME and lots of people had suggestions about low-cost and high-end peer review and publication management systems.

Kimberly Taylor
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For background on peer reviewers, WAME includes peer reviewers as part of the editors' syllabus http://www.wame.org/resources/editor-s-syllabus#reviewers and past listserve discussions about peer reviewers are available at http://www.wame.org/wame-by-topic#peer.

Margaret A. Winker
Vice-President, WAME
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Our journal MÆDICA—a Journal of Clinical Medicine has this protocol for peer reviewers:

The manuscripts will be submitted both as attachment to the e-mail in Word format to ... and/or in print (to the following address…) in 2 copies, accompanied by a floppy disk or a CD. Professional photo processing, scanning, graph processing—if needed—are the responsibility of the editing team.

The manuscript will be immediately registered, and the registration number will be communicated at the earliest convenience to the authors by e-mail.

Note: The authors must provide a correspondence e-mail address.

After manuscript receipt, the corresponding author will receive a short e-mail confirming the receipt. This will contain the registration number, the date the manuscript was received and the fact that the manuscript was handed out to the subject editor (the specialised member of the Editorial Board). The Editoreditor-in-chief or the deputy editors hand the manuscript to the subject editors.

The initial responsibilities of the subject editors consist of verifying if the manuscript complies with the editing criteria.

– If the manuscript does not comply with the criteria, the subject editor will send a short e-mail to the corresponding author, with the request to rewrite the manuscript according to the editorial criteria.

– If there are serious errors of content and/or editing, the manuscript will be rejected ab initio by the Editor-in-chief.

– If the manuscript complies from the very beginning with the editing requirements, the subject editor picks 2 peer reviewers (either from those already accredited by the journal, or from a number of new proposals, in which case he conveys the proposal/s in order to be sent the approval letter acknowledging the quality of official reviewer of the journal), and it is compulsory that one of them belongs to an academic site other than the authors of the manuscript.

Possible objections formulated by the authors against reviewers are to be respected by the editors.

The subject editor (or the editorial board at the request of the subject editor) sends by e-mail to the peer reviewer the letter of request (demanding a review within 2 weeks), together with a manuscript.

The reviewers' decision (approval without alterations, approval with major/minor alterations, rejection) will be immediately communicated by e-mail to the corresponding author by the subject editor (the message will be sent in Cc to ...).

If the manuscript gets approval with alterations, the anonymous comments of the reviewers will be coveyed together with the reviewers' decision and a statement of the subject editor, which will be the synthesis of the reviewers' opinions.

The corresponding author shall send the altered variant of the manuscript within 4 weeks (complying with the initial submittal requests, mentioning the initial registration number of the manuscript followed by ".R1"), together with a letter/Word document as attachment to an e-mail where he/she responds item by item to the comments of the reviewers (the mail is addressed to the subject editor + cc. ...), arguing the manner in which the manuscript was modified.

The subject editor will convey the corresponding author's answer to the peer reviewer. If they are satisfied with the corresponding author's answer, they will send the subject editor the decision of approval for publication of the altered variant of the manuscript (“.R1”).

If the peer reviewers consider the corresponding author's answer is only partially satisfactory, they will request through new item by item comments an additional review of the manuscript (in which case the manuscript will receive the extension “.R2” ), the editing process following the same route as in the case of the first revision.

If the peer reviewers consider that either on the first, or the second revision, the corresponding author did not meet/or met poorly the revision requests, they will deny the approval for publication, which will be communicated to the subject editor.

The approval for publication once taken by the reviewers, the decision will be communicated in editorial meeting (an e-mail to ... message, which will immediately reach all members of the editorial board an confirm that the attached article was accepted). During this meeting, the degree of priority for the manuscript will be established, depending on the following criteria:

• reviewers' opinions

• no author will have 2 articles in the same issue (as first author)

• the degree of coverage for the different sections of the journal

You can also find our peer-review protocols on-line, at the following address: http://www.maedica.ro/regulament.html

Mihai-Cristian Popescu