Editor Guidelines

Topical editors play a central role in ensuring the quality of content that is published in ing.grid. The decision to accept or reject a submission is based solely on its compliance with ing.grid guidelines, relevance to the focus and scope, and novelty to the field.  

After a new submission is turned in, the Editor-in-Chief performs a first, brief check of compliance with the focus and scope. The managing editors check the template conformities and evaluates the results of plagiarism check.

If the submission meets the criteria, the managing editors publish the submission on the preprint server.

The Editor-in-Chief then assigns a suitable topical editor (referred to simply as “editor” in the rest of the text) that will be responsible for managing the submission’s journey through the open peer review. 

The responsibilities of the editor are described below.

Before Open Review

  • At first, the editor evaluates whether the submission complies with the focus and scope of ing.grid.
  • The editor checks whether the paper is well written and brings novelty to the field of data management in engineering sciences. 
  • The editor checks whether the authors have read and understood the instructions described in our Author Guidelines, especially the authorship specifications.
  • The editor verifies whether the authors declared any conflict of interest, whether they offered funding information and whether they have permission to publish material from other sources under a CC-BY license.
  • The editor has to ensure that the supplementary material (data and/or software) is available and accessible to the reviewers and the community.
  • Every submission to ing.grid must follow the FAIR principles. The editor should consider this before assigning it to the reviewers. 

Initiating the Open Review

When all the previous requirements are checked and the submission is considered suitable for ing.grid, the editor: 

  • finds suitable reviewers to evaluate the submission according to the following criteria: 
    • Reviewers should have expertise in the area of the submission and must declare any conflict of interest regarding their role.
    • At least two reviewers must be assigned for each submission.

    • invites new reviewers by e-mail to register as reviewers on the Become a Reviewer page (the editor invitation e-mail contains a reviewer invitation template which includes a link to the reviewer guidelines on the ing.grid website. The message also includes a link to an online form through which the reviewers submit their comments. They do not need to navigate the journal backend.)
    • assigns reviewers from the reviewer database in the repository manager (all registered reviewers appear there)
    • assigns a due date for the reviewers to submit their invited review comments (about four working weeks)

    Managing the Open Review

    After reviewers are assigned, the open peer review officially starts and is performed entirely on the ing.grid preprint server. The editor is responsible for moderating both the invited review comments and the community review comments which can be submitted by anyone with an ing.grid account.  

    The editor follows the steps below: 

    • The editor guarantees that the Code of Conduct and the Publication Ethics of ing.grid are being followed by the community. Any comment that violates these guidelines should not be published and, in case of a severe violation, they can evaluate whether the offending user should be banned from the community in accordance with the Enforcement Guidelines.
    • The editor evaluates whether the invited comments from the assigned reviewers provide a thorough review of the submission and whether they provide a sufficient base for the editorial decision.
    • If the invited comments are acceptable, the editor makes the invited comments public and thus visible to the authors.
    • The editor publishes a comment containing the editorial decision (accept/revise/reject) - template can be found here.
    • The editor asks authors to respond to reviewers’ comments within the deadline of 2 weeks.
    • If revisions have been requested by the reviewers in the invited comments, authors need to upload an updated version of their submission. In this case, the editor must invite the same reviewers for a new round of comments. 
    • The editor ensures that both the reviewers and the authors stick to the assigned deadlines of the review process. 
    • If the editor encounters any difficulty during this process, they should contact the managing editors to notify them of the issue. Managing editors may also take action when a problem is identified, contacting the editors accordingly.

    The review rounds are repeated until a final accept or reject decision is made by the editor.

    Publishing the Submission

    Once the submission is accepted, the editor asks the authors to upload a final version of the manuscript/descriptor as a compressed LaTeX folder, along with all updated links to software or data and/or supplementary material.

    Then, the editor informs the managing editors (editors@inggrid.org) that the submission is complete.

    Managing editors will take care of the copyediting as well as the final authors' review of the material to be published. Then, the submission goes through the production and typesetting stages, where article galleys are created in XML/JATS format for long-term archiving and publication on the website.