Invitation to review
All submitted manuscripts are reviewed by at least two experts in the field who are invited to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and provide recommendations to the editor on whether a manuscript can be accepted, requires revisions, or should be rejected.
At Materials International time is highly valued so, in order to be effective, an initial verification of the manuscript will be performed by the Managing Editor of the journal, on the suitability to the aims and scopes of our publication. The peer-reviewing process will be then organized by the Editorial Office and at least two independent experts will each provide a review report.
Invited reviewers are kindly asked to respond to the reviewing invitation as soon as possible, based on the manuscript title and abstract. In case of a declined invitation, a suggestion on alternative reviewers is welcome. In order to ensure efficient and high-quality publishing services, reviewers may ask for an extension in case more time is needed to compose the report.
What to provide as a reviewer
Invited reviewers are kindly asked to provide a detailed, constructive review report containing an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript, by taking into consideration the following aspects:
Potential Conflict of Interests
Reviewers are kindly asked to inform the journal editor in case of a conflict of interests that may impair the review report, in either positive or negative ways. The editorial office will check as far as possible before the invitation. However, the cooperation of reviewers is highly appreciated in this regard. In the case of a previous assessment of the manuscript for a different journal, this should not be considered a conflict of interest in itself. Under these circumstances, reviewers could feel free to inform the editor whether any improvements have been made to the previous version.
Confidential and anonymous reviewing process
Confidentiality on the abstract and content of the manuscript is requested from reviewers. The editorial office must be informed in case the reviewer would like a student or colleague to complete the review on their behalf.
Our journals operate single or double-blind peer-review and reviewers should be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, through their comments or metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format.
In case authors wish to publish the review reports with their papers, reviewers will be noted in the invitation message, in this case, the open review reports must be signed by reviewers at publication. Anyhow, this will only be done with the reviewer’s express permission. In all other cases, review reports are considered confidential and will only be disclosed with the explicit permission of the reviewer.
Always on time
Materials International aims to provide efficient and high-quality publishing services. Therein, reviewers are kindly asked to support this cause by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please, contact the editorial office if you require an extension for the review deadline.
How to perform the reviewing process
Reviewers that are invited to evaluate a submission to Materials International are kindly asked to prepare a report containing (·) a short introduction to defining the objectives of the manuscript and its main contributions; (·) extensive comments on both strong and weak points of the paper; (·) specific comments on phrases (line numbers), tables, figures. Formatting issues will be addressed by the editors.
Guideline questions for the reviewing process are given below:
Meeting the ethics
Material International aims for an ethical publication process. The reported results should only be submitted for publication here and should not have been published before, even partially. Also, reusing text from another source should be appropriately cited.
The biological studies included in the submitted manuscript must have been approved by an Institutional Ethical Committee and done accordingly to generally accepted ethical research standards.
In case of scientific misconduct, fraud, plagiarism, or other unethical behavior, reviewers are kindly asked to immediately notify the in-house editor.
The overall recommendation
Finally, reviewers are kindly asked to provide an overall recommendation for the submitted manuscript, as follows:
- Accept in present form, when the paper needs no further changes.
- Accept after minor revision, when the paper is mainly accepted, but authors must respond to small reviewer’s comments and questions. A five- days time allowance is given for authors to provide a response.
- Reconsider after major revision, when the acceptance of the manuscript is conditioned by the ability of authors to respond and comply to reviewer’s comments. A ten- days time allowance is given for authors to provide a response.
Reject, when the article is not accepted for publication due to either major flaws or lack of originality. No offer of resubmission to the journal will be made.