Review Editor Guidelines - Frontiers

Checklist
Article Acceptance/Rejection
If the Review Editors are satisfied with the authors’ efforts at amending the manuscript, they
then briefly finalize their Interactive Review Reports, which automatically notifies the Associate
Editor of article acceptance. The Associate Editor accepts the final version of the manuscript
within five days, and this action does not require the approval of the Specialty Chief Editor.
Once a manuscript is accepted, the authors receive an automated notification informing them of
the acceptance and the provisional PDF will instantly appear online. Review Editors are invited
to publish a one-page joint commentary to be linked to the published article, however this is not
mandatory. Payment of the publication fee is required within thirty days of acceptance and
necessary before final publication of the manuscript.
Articles can only be rejected by the Chief Editor, while the Associate Editor who handles an
article can only recommend rejecting an article. The Chief Editor may override an Associate
Editor’s recommendation to reject the article and insist to call in further Review Editors to
continue the review process.
The Assignment of Associate and Review Editors to a Manuscript
A key philosophy at Frontiers is to constantly move responsibility for publishing scientific papers
down rather than up the chain. It would be a big step for publishing if we could increase the
integrity of the peer-review system! At the same time, we have a huge responsibility to authors
when their valuable work is submitted. Unnecessary time delays are not acceptable.
In all editing/review invitations, the Associate/Review Editors are requested to confirm that they
don’t have any conflicts of interest. Moreover, to further guarantee the transparency of the
review, the names of the Associate and Review Editors involved are disclosed on all published
articles, without exceptions.
The assignment of Review and Associate Editors to the review of a manuscript is composed of
the following steps:
1. During submission, the authors indicate an Associate Editor whom they trust to be both
knowledgeable and unbiased for editing their manuscript.
2. The authors may list up to three Review Editors who might have a conflict of interest to
be excluded from the review process.
3. The Associate Editor selected by the authors is asked to edit the manuscript. If the
Associate Editor does not accept this invitation within two days, the journal’s entire
Associate Board is invited.
4. The first Associate Editor to respond is assigned to edit the manuscript.
5. The Associate Editor has seven days to assign two Review Editors.*
6. If two Review Editors have not accepted after a seven-day delay, the journal’s entire
Review Board is invited. Those Review Editors excluded by the authors are excluded
from this invitation.
7. The Associate and Chief Editors can, at any time, invite additional Review Editors
and/or revoke those who have accepted as deemed necessary.
The general guidelines for inviting Associate and Review Editors to join the boards invoke the
recruitment of top ranking researchers in terms of number of papers published and citation
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