Peer Review Process

Editors will assign two peer reviewers per Journal Review and facilitate the process ensuring timeliness and professionalism throughout. All participants will be required to document potential conflicts of interest.

How We Make Our Open Peer Review Open

Peer review will be conducted as open review. Authors and reviewers will know each other's identities, and peer review comments will be published alongside each Journal Review.

Editors will mediate and edit Peer Reviews for confidentiality and civility, then Peer Reviews will be published unsigned. Journal Reviews, Responses, and Peer Reviews will be linked together at each individual piece’s article page/URI in the style of supplementary material.

In accordance with COPE’s Guidelines on Editing Peer Reviews, RJJR editors will work as collaboratively as possible with peer reviewers when editing peer reviews for tone, language, and deviations from journal policy. When this is not possible, editors will communicate with peer reviewers when substantial changes are made to their peer reviews.

Guidelines for Peer Reviewers

General Guidelines

• Presume the scholarship and expertise of the contributor.
• Peer Reviews need not focus on copyediting, style or grammar. 
• Peer Reviewers shall seek to provide a fair, honest, and unbiased Peer Review, utilizing kindness, especially for writers not using their primary language.

Specific Instructions

• Using our rubric as a guide, peer reviewers will complete an assessment of the Journal Review in a timely fashion. A complete Journal Review shall comment on each section of the rubric and add to readers’ understanding of the journal being reviewed.
• We recommend Peer Reviewers engage the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors when developing reviews, specifically Heuristic A.
• Peer reviewers’ job is not to pass judgment on the quality of the author’s other work, their position, or their status in the profession, but to ask guiding questions, assess the facts and conclusions drawn, and provide suggestions that would improve or further develop the author’s assessment in the Journal Review. This might involve checking the journal's and publisher's websites yourself to verify information.
• Criteria to consider when making a peer reviewed recommendation of a Journal Review:
  • Adequate coverage of the facets of a Journal Review - not all items in the Rubric need to be covered, but the submission needs to feel comprehensive and complete
  • Provides comprehensive information that helps potential authors considering submitting to the journal make a informed decision
  • Does not omit and properly reflects any particularly relevant information peer reviewers note about the journal
  • Citations and/or evidence for any claims made
  • Evidence that ethical and editorial policies were followed
  • Clear and understandable language

Competing Interests

RJJRs guiding principle for submissions and peer review is transparency. If in doubt, carry out your Peer Review and tell us about any possible conflicts. We can have a conversation if it’s a problem. 

If you think there is any possibility that you might have any kind of a conflict of interest in reviewing a particular journal or publisher, tell us about it. We will frown on any potential conflict of interest that an author or reviewer did not disclose and that later comes to light. The editorial board will discuss any such conflicts and recommend possible consequences, up to fully retracting the Journal Review.