Celebrating Peer Review Week at New Phytologist

Last updated: 29 Sep, 2015


Peer Review Week logoThis week Wiley, ORCID, Sense about Science and Science Open are celebrating one of the most important aspects of the scientific process. Peer review is the process by which authors subject their research to the scrutiny of others in their field. It allows Editors and Reviewers to check the relevance of the work to the journal, and the quality of the science underpinning it.

 

Peer review is vital as a method for ensuring that the science published by the journal has been performed correctly and is of value to the plant science community. The peer review process can vary from journal to journal, and among disciplines, but regardless of the mechanics of the process, the central message remains the same: robust peer review is critical to scholarly communication.

 

Here at the New Phytologist Central Office, we have a small team devoted to keeping the cogs of the peer-review mechanism turning. We work with 45 Editors and Co-Editors , who draw on the expertise of almost 100 Advisors and many voluntary reviewers to assess submissions to the journal. We strive for rigorous and fast peer review, and in 2014 the average time a paper spent in review, from submission to first decision, was less than 27 days (median: 26 days). We also aim to publish accepted papers online via EarlyView  within two months of the acceptance date – in 2014 the average time from acceptance to publication was less than 39 days (median: 36 days). We are also committed to ensuring free access to all of the Tansley reviews, Tansley insights and Forum articles that we publish, in order to communicate the latest advances in plant science to as broad an audience as possible.

 

If you’re submitting a paper to New Phytologist, be sure to check our Author Guidelines, where you will find all the information necessary for preparing your paper for submission. Want to browse the kinds of papers that New Phytologist publishes? Have a look through our latest issue, or read some of our reviews. You can stay up to date with all of the inaugural Peer Review Week activity with the hashtag #peerrevwk15.

 

Thumbnail image credit: flickr/universalpops, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.