Review Process
ing.grid is committed to open science and works under an open peer review policy. This way, the opportunity for collaborating with the reviewing is not only reserved for the assigned referees: the community can also take part in the discussion before the publishing of the article. After the article is accepted, the review discussion comments are made available and marked with a DOI to ensure transparency of the review process.
The review process can be summarized in the following eight steps:
1. Submission
Authors submit their manuscript to ing.grid through a preprint submission. They must agree that it can be published on the preprint server at the moment of submission and that they will not be anonymous during the open peer-review process (Read also: Author guidelines).
2. Assignments
Managing Editors assign the submission to a topical editor, who is responsible for performing a formal check and assigning referees to the submission.
3. Open peer review
The referees write their comments (one comment per referee/per referee round). Afterwards, these comments are made available in the comment section of the manuscript on the preprint server. Referees can choose to be anonymous for the duration of the review or beyond, their comments being identified by a special flag (Read also: Review criteria).
4. Community discussion
At the same time, the community is able to make their comments. This process also happens on the preprint server, in parallel to the review process. The authors have the choice to respond to the community comments already during the review process, although they are not obliged to do so.
5. First decision
The editors can and should intervene in the review process by writing comments. After that, they will make a decision known to the authors and the reviewers, and apart from requesting the submission of a revised manuscript they also ask the authors to respond to the reviewers' comments.
The decision can be labeled as:
A) Accepted (authors should submit no revision)
B) Upload the revised version (this also applies for minor revisions)
C) Rejected
6. Revision
In case of need for a revision, another review round starts on the preprint platform, following the steps 3, 4 and 5, and topical editors will make a new public decision.
7. Accepted articles
Managing editors upload accepted articles for typesetting. Authors need to give final approval for publishing after this process (last error check).
8. Publishing
The final version is published at ing.grid and linked to the preprint manuscript with the review discussion.