BECOMING A REVIEWER

Getting involved in the peer review process can be a highly rewarding experience that can also improve your research and help to further your career.

If you’re just starting as a reviewer, don’t be deterred. Journal editors are often looking to expand their pool of reviewers, which means there will be a demand for your particular area of expertise.

 

WHO CAN BECOME A REVIEWER?

• Should be expertise and have experience in the specialist field related to the journal
• Should have a minimum of 2 years of professional experience in research and publication with a minimum of 5 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
• Editors might ask you to look at a specific aspect of an article, even if the overall topic is outside of your specialist knowledge. They should outline in their invitation to review just what it is they would like you to assess.
• All in all, you simply need enough specialist knowledge to evaluate the manuscript and provide constructive criticism to editors and authors. What’s more, a good reviewer can be at any stage of their career.

 

RESPONSIBILITIES OF REVIEWER

• A reviewer needs to examine in detail the article as assigned for review by Chief-Editor or Publisher.
• A reviewer needs to review a minimum of 3 articles in a calendar year.
• Need to carefully examine the manuscript as it is structured as per author guidelines.
• Careful examination of the aim and objectives of the work carried out.
• The correctness of the conclusions, results, and recommendations along with references.
• Copyediting and proofreading following publishing standards of the manuscripts especially with grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
• Coverage areas of the manuscript in relevance with the scopes of journals.
• A reviewer needs to check Plagiarism related issues if any.
• The reviewer needs to give some suggestions based on the structure of the manuscript. In general, there is no limit for the maximum inputs.

 

BENEFITS OF REVIEWER

• A Reviewer will get prestigious professional recognition and will get a certificate and appointment as a reviewer which is a professional achievement.
• A Reviewer will get a 75%-100% waiver for his manuscripts as main author/corresponding in any of our journals.
• A Reviewer will be included in the journal’s annual acknowledgment of reviewers.
• A Reviewer will be considered for the journal’s outstanding reviewer award.
• A Reviewer will able to enhance knowledge and quality from various research work.
• Reviewers/Referral are important to us; CRID’s RMS aims to engage reviewers/Referral and reward them for the work they do.
• Reviewer/Referral get remuneration for the reviewing research article.
• If the reviewer/Referral recommends his/her colleague /students to publish the paper in CRID then Reviewer got the discount amount from the CRID.
• Getting involved in the peer review process can be a highly rewarding experience that can also improve your research and help to further your career.
• Improve your reputation and increase your exposure to key figures in the field.
• Stay up to date with the latest literature, and have advanced access to research results.
• Develop critical thinking skills essential to research.
• Advance in your career – peer review is an essential role for researchers.
• If you will become a reviewer/Referral for CRID then the reviewer has to recommend his/her, colleague /students, to publish the paper in CRID then Reviewer got the discount amount from the CRID.
• So, when your recognized colleague/students submit the paper in CRID for publishing at that time they have to provide the reviewer ID to CRID.

 

How to become a reviewer/Referral for CRID?

• Please visit our website and join us as a reviewer/Referral. For that fill up the available form through our website.
• The reviewer will receive notification for submitting the request to CRID by provided mail id.
• Then after we will evaluate your request for reviewer/Referral.
• If we accept your request then we will send the confirmation mail to you with the login credential details for the Reviewer/Referral Management System.
• In the mail, you will be got the Reviewer/Referral ID.
• Then after you can log in to our system for reviewing the process and recognition program.

POTENTIAL CONFLICTS OF INTERESTS

We ask reviewers to inform the journal editor if they hold a conflict of interests that may prejudice the review report, either in a positive or negative way. The editorial office will check as far as possible before invitation, however we appreciate the cooperation of reviewers in this matter. Reviewers who are invited to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal should not consider this as a conflict of interest in itself. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let us know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

CONFIDENTIALITY AND ANONYMITY

Reviewers should keep the content of the manuscript, including the abstract, confidential. Reviewers must inform the Editorial Office if they would like a student or colleague to complete the review on their behalf.

CRID journals operate double blind peer review. Reviewers should be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

CRID journals offer authors the possibility to publish review reports with their paper and for reviewers to sign their open review reports, however this will only be done at publication with your express permission. If this is the case, it will be noted in the message inviting you to review. In all other cases, review reports are considered confidential and will only be disclosed with the explicit permission of the reviewer.

Note that, as the reviewer, you will have access to other reviewers’ reports via the online submission system after you have submitted your report.

TIMELY REVIEW REPORTS

CRID aims to provide an efficient and high-quality publishing service to authors and to the scientific community. We ask reviewers to assist by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please contact the editorial office if you require an extension to the review deadline.

PEER-REVIEW AND EDITORIAL PROCEDURE

All manuscripts sent for publication in our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts (this includes research and review articles, spontaneous submissions, and invited papers). The Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. We ask our authors for adequate revisions (with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is made. The final decision is made by the academic editor (usually the Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Board Member of a journal or the Guest Editor of a Special Issue). Accepted articles are copy-edited and English-edited.

RATING THE MANUSCRIPT

Please rate the following aspects of the manuscript:

• Originality/Novelty: Is the question original and well defined? Do the results provide an advance in current knowledge?
• Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses and speculations carefully identified as such?
• Quality of Presentation: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of the results used?
• Scientific Soundness: is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Are the data robust enough to draw the conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?
• Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the Journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited number of people? (please see the Aims and Scope of the journal)
• Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Do the authors have addressed an important long-standing question with smart experiments?
• English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?

Manuscripts submitted to CRID journals should meet the highest standards of publication ethics:

• Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
• Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.
• For biological studies, the studies reported should have been carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical research standards.

If reviewers become aware of such scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should raise these concerns with the in-house editor immediately.

 

OVERALL RECOMMENDATION

Please provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript as follows:

• Accept in Present Form: The paper is accepted without any further changes.
• Accept after Minor Revisions: The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.
• Reconsider after Major Revisions: The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. Usually, only one round of major revisions is allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.
• Reject: The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper is rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.

Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors.

REVIEW REPORT

Review reports should contain:

• A brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper and its main contributions.
• Broad comments highlighting areas of strength and weakness. These comments should be specific enough for authors to be able to respond.
• Specific comments referring to line numbers, tables or figures. Reviewers need not comment on formatting issues that do not obscure the meaning of the paper, as these will be addressed by editors.

Note that CRID journals follow several standards and guidelines, including those from the medical journals, CONSORT (trial reporting), TOP (data transparency and openness), PRISMA (systematic reviews and meta-analyses) and ARRIVE (reporting of in vivo experiments). See the Publishing Standards and Guidelines page or contact the editorial office for more details. Reviewers familiar with the guidelines should report any concerns they have about their implementation.

Reviewers must not recommend citation of work by themselves or close colleagues when it is not clearly necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript under review.

Your comments should not include an indication of whether you think the article should be accepted for publication. For further guidance about writing a critical review, please refer to the following documents:

1. COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. Committee on Publication Ethics. Available online.
2. Hames, I. Peer Review and Manuscript Management in Scientific Journals: Guidelines for Good Practice. Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, UK, 2007.
3. Writing a journal article review. Australian National University: Canberra, Australia, 2010. Available online.
4. Golash-Boza, T. How to write a peer review for an academic journal: Six steps from start to finish. Available online.

 

SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION

The post of a Reviewer is complete an honorarium and there will no remuneration provided for the job; however, the publisher can provide special allowances for their quality services.

This agreement may be terminated at any time if a lack of mutual understanding on common aspects as per the policies of the publisher or repetitive unsatisfactory performance of the assigned work.

A Reviewer agrees to display the name and photograph and other contact details on the website of the site and hardcopy of the journal.

A Reviewer agreed to maintain publication ethics and will never disclose the name of the author, or will contact the author or details of the manuscript to any others except the publisher.

 

Full Name:	Qualification:
Current Designation:	Institute:
Field of Specialty:	Research Key Words (at least 5):
Email ID-1:	Email ID-2:
Mobile Number:	Address: City/District         State *   Country *               Postal Code *
Attach a CV/Resume *	Attach a Passport Size Photo*

 

Please send the above information with the attachments to the following email addresses according to your expertise area of the Journal

Journal of Biological Therapeutics and Public Health	editor.btph@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Applied Economics and Management Research	editor.aemr@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Energy and Environment	editor.ee@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Food and Nutrition Security	editor.fns@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Applied Sciences and Engineering Research	editor.aser@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Arts, Social and Sustainable Development	editor.assd@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Social Epidemiology	editor.se@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Sustainable Soil and Environment	editor.sse@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org
Journal of Agricultural Sciences and Sustainability	editor.jass@journal.cridglobal.org	info@journal.cridglobal.org

Editorial process of CRID Journals

CRID operates a rigorous peer-review process. In most cases this is a single-blind assessment with at least two independent reviewers, followed by a final acceptance/rejection decision by the Editor-in-Chief, or another academic editor approved by the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for the academic quality of the publication process, including acceptance decisions, approval of Guest Editors and special issue topics, and new Editorial Board members.

A summary of the editorial process is given in the flowchart below. The following provides notes on each step.

Pre-check

Immediately after submission, this check is initially carried out by the managing editor to assess:

• Suitability of the manuscript to the journal/section/special issue;
• Qualification and background of authors;
• Reject obviously poor manuscripts.

The Academic Editor, i.e., the Editor-in-Chief in the case of regular submissions, or the Guest Editor in the case of Special Issue submissions, or an Editorial Board Member in case of a conflict of interest, will be notified of the submission and invited to check and recommend reviewers.

Peer-review

The process is single-blind for most journals, meaning that the author does not know the identity of the reviewer, but the reviewer knows the identity of the author. Some journals operate double-blind peer review.

At least two review reports are collected for each submitted article. Suggestions of reviewers can be made by the academic editor during pre-check. Alternatively, CRID editorial staff will use qualified Editorial Board Members, qualified reviewers from our database, or new reviewers identified by web searches for related articles.

The following checks are applied to all reviewers:

• That they hold no conflicts of interest with the authors, including if they have published together in the last five years;
• That they hold a PhD (exceptions are made in some fields, e.g. medicine);
• They must have recent publications in the field of the submitted paper;
• They have not recently been invited to review a manuscript for any CRID journal.

To assist academic editors, CRID staff handle all communication with reviewers, authors, and the external editor; however, Academic Editors can check the status of manuscripts and the identity of reviewers at any time. Reviewers are given 7-10 days to write their review. For the review of a revised manuscript, reviewers are asked to provide their report within three days. In both cases, extensions can be granted on request.

A paper can only be accepted for publication by an academic editor. Employed CRID staff can only reject papers: it would create a clear conflict of interest if they were permitted to accept a paper as their salary is paid for by the APC of accepted articles.

CRID journals operate an open peer review option, meaning that the authors have the option to publish the review reports and author responses with the published paper (often referred to as open reports). In addition, reviewers may choose to sign their reports if the review is published, in which case the reviewer name appears on the review report (referred to as open identity). The default option is for reviewers to remain anonymous and for reports not to be published, reviewers and authors respectively must opt into this option. If an article is rejected no details will be published. Open peer review has the benefit of increasing transparency about the review process and providing further information about the paper for interested readers and we encourage authors to choose open review.

Authors can recommend potential reviewers. Journal editors will check to make sure there are no conflicts of interest before contacting those reviewers, and will not consider those with competing interests. Reviewers are asked to declare any conflicts of interest. Authors can also enter the names of potential peer reviewers they wish to exclude from consideration in the peer review of their manuscript, during the initial submission progress. The editorial team will respect these requests so long as this does not interfere with the objective and thorough assessment of the submission.

 

Editor Decision

Acceptance decisions on manuscripts, after peer review, are made by an academic editor, either the Editor-in-Chief, a Guest Editor, or another suitable Editorial Board member. When making an editorial decision, we expect that the academic editor checks the following:

• The suitability of selected reviewers;
• Adequacy of reviewer comments and author response;
• Overall scientific quality of the paper.

The editor can select from: accept, reject, ask author for revision, ask for an additional reviewer.

If there is any suspicion that a paper may contain plagiarism, the editorial office will check using the industry standard iThenticate software.

Reviewers make recommendations, and Editors-in-Chief are free to disagree with their views. If they do so, they should justify their decision, for the benefit of the authors.

Editorial independence is extremely important and CRID does not interfere with editorial decisions. In particular, no paper is published without the agreement of an academic editor and CRID staff do not advise academic editors about accepting or rejecting articles.

CRID staff or editorial board members (including Editors-in-Chief) are not involved in the processing their own academic work. Their submissions are assigned to at least two independent outside reviewers. Decisions are made by other editorial board members who do not have a conflict of interest with the author.

Revision

In cases where only minor revisions are recommended, the author is usually requested to revise the paper before referring to the external editor. Articles may or may not be sent to reviewers after author revision, dependent on whether the reviewer requested to see the revised version and the wishes of the Academic editor. Apart from in exceptional circumstances, we allow a maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript.

 

Editorial process of CRID Journals

 

Production

CRID carries out production on all manuscripts, including language editing, copy editing and conversion to XML. Language editing is carried out by professional English editing staff. In the small number of cases where extensive editing or formatting is required, we charge authors an additional fee (with authors’ prior approval). The authors are also free to use other English editing service, or consult a native English-speaking colleague the latter being our preferred option.

 

Publication Ethics

CRID is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), including following its Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. Our journals follow COPE’s procedures for dealing with potentially unethical behaviour by authors, reviewers or editors. All CRID editorial staff are trained in how to detect and respond to ethical problems.

Details on ethical considerations for submitting papers can be found in the instructions for authors of journals

Ethical issues raised by readers of the journal will be investigated by the editorial office following procedures recommended by COPE. Disputes on the validity of research reported in published papers can be settled by the editorial board. For disputes around authorship, data ownership, author misconduct, etc., where necessary we will refer to external organizations such as a university ethics committee. Authors are asked to respond to any substantiated allegations made against them.

 

Authorship Disputes

To manage authorship disputes we follow COPE guidelines, particularly How to spot authorship problems [PDF]. Typically, if all authors agree, the authorship can be updated via a Correction. If not, we require an authoritative statement from the authors’ institution(s) about who qualifies for authorship.

 

Publishing Standards and Guidelines

CRID follow the following guidelines and standards for its journals:

ICMJE: Medically related CRID journals follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. The guidelines comprehensively cover all aspects of editing, from how the journal is managed to details about peer review and handling complaints. The majority of the recommendations are not specific to medical journals and are followed by all CRID journals.

The CONSORT statement covers reporting of randomized, controlled trials. We encourage authors to verify their work against the checklist and flow diagram and upload them with their submission.

TOP covers transparency and openness in the reporting of research. Our journals aim to be at level 1 or 2 for all aspects of TOP. Specific requirements vary between journals and can be requested from the editorial office.

PRISMA covers systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Authors are recommended to complete the checklist and flow diagram and include it with their submission.

ARRIVE contains guidelines for reporting in vivo experiments. Authors are recommended to verify their work against the checklist and include it with their submission.

Compliance with the standards and guidelines above will be taken into account during the final decision and any discrepancies should be clearly explained by the authors. We recommend that authors highlight relevant guidelines in their cover letter.

 

Editorial Independence

All articles published by CRID are peer reviewed and assessed by our independent editorial boards, and CRID staff are not involved in decisions to accept manuscripts. When making an editorial decision, we expect the academic editor to make their decision based only upon:

• The suitability of selected reviewers;
• Adequacy of reviewer comments and author response;
• Overall scientific quality of the paper.

In all of our journals, in every aspect of operation, CRID policies are informed by the mission to make science and research findings open and accessible as widely and rapidly as possible.