Confidential peer review

ETAI:s confidential peer review is done in the same way as for conventional journals: two or three reviewers who are specialists in the topic of the article are requested to recommend whether it is to be accepted. However, there are also some differences.

First, since some of the conventional reviewing duties are performed by the First Publication Archive (such as checking language correctness) and by the public review process (such as checking the adequacy of references), the confidential review concentrates on the following three aspects:

Checking that the body of the paper verifies the claim that is made in the abstract.
Judging whether the result is non-trivial and of importance to researchers in the field. (If the public debate has shown that the result is not new, then of course the paper will not be accepted).
Judging whether the presentation is clear and concise enough. If it is confused, or much more verbose than is necessary for showing the result at hand, then it constitutes grounds for rejection.

A fourth, possible grounds for rejection is if there is some exceptional and unforeseen circumstance which implies that it should not be accepted.

Another difference against conventional journal reviewing is that, for rejected papers, the grounds for rejection are always specified in a public review report. Typically, one or possibly more of the above mentioned criteria are invoked. This makes it possible for the author to "explain what happened" in the process.

The review decision must be returned within three months of submission of the article.

It is our intention and expectation that papers which have been accepted after ETAI:s reviewing process will have a higher and more uniformly high quality than papers that were accepted in ordinary journals.

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