After detailed preparation and selection of the journal, the article can be sent to the selected journal for peer review.
What to watch out for:
- do not forget the protection of patents, industrial property, sensitive data, etc.
What happens to an article after it has been included in the peer review process:
If an article is included in the peer review process, it means that it formally meets the editorial requirements and has passed the originality check (e.g. SimilarityCheck).
As a rule, the editors assess the following:
- Basic assessment of the quality of the paper by the editors
- Suitability for the journal
- Adherence to author guidelines, formality, level of language, publication ethics
- Plagiarism check
In the following steps, the scientific level of the article is assessed.
In principle, Peer-review means that the paper is reviewed by independent experts in the field, who are not related to the author, the published project or the department, and have at least a PhD. Their comments serve as guidelines and suggestions for the author to improve not only the paper but also the experiment. By incorporating them, the author gains experience that can be further evaluated in his/her work. Therefore, the author is usually required to send a “letter to reviewer/s” along with the revised paper, in which he/she responds to the reviewers’ comments and usually thanks them for their suggestions. Usually there are two reviewers, but if their opinions differ fundamentally, then there are more than one.
Types of review:
- Open peer review – author and reviewer know each other’s identity
- Single-blind peer review – the author does not know the names of the reviewers, the reviewers know the author of the paper
- Double-blind peer review – the identity of the authors and reviewers is unknown to both parties
Nowadays, especially in the context of unethical publishing by predatory publishers, the quality of the “peer-review” is becoming a criterion for the quality of the title, and some publishers add the names of reviewers to the published paper (with their consent).
The peer review process and other steps in the processing of a manuscript are described for each journal, and these procedures must be followed for successful publication in the journal. Here is an example at CTU – university OA journal Acta Polytechnica – everything is described in detail in the attached document Publication process in detail.
If an article is published in an OA journal, it becomes open and fully accessible on the day of publication.