Information for Editors

Editors for Consortium journals must agree to the three basic principles of the Consortium (see Joining). The Editor-in-Chief must initiate the process of joining the Consortium, and must represent the Editors and Publisher, who all must agree to the Consortium rules and procedures. Once a journal has joined the consortium, it will be listed in this website Journals along with the contact information for that journal. This listing will facilitate contact between journals by identifying the official contact person and email address.

The main advantage of the Consortium for Editors is that by reducing the number of times a manuscript must be reviewed, and thus reducing the workload on reviewers, it should become easier to find new reviewers when necessary. However, individual journal editors will still have the discretion to use reviews from other journals as they see fit. At one extreme, if a manuscript arrives with reviews that say it is of high quality but not appropriate for the original journal, the manuscript might be accepted without further review. Alternatively, if the authors have made extensive revisions that were requested in the reviews, the editor might return the manuscript to the original reviewers for re-review (if their identities have also been transferred). At the other extreme, if the reviews seemed to lack appropriate expertise or depth, the editor could choose to disregard them and get comments from new reviewers. Thus the Consortium process will only help facilitate the disposition of new manuscripts, and in no case will restrict the freedom of the second journal from handling the paper as the editors see fit.

Journals that join the Consortium will have to agree to inform the reviewer that the review may be passed on to another Consortium journal, and to ask for permission to pass on his or her identity as well. Review forms must be configured so that no confidential comments to the editors are permitted, beyond those pertaining to human or animal subject welfare, or to conflict of interest or scientific misconduct. To the extent that confidential comments to the editors may be useful, deleting this information from forwarding reviews would leave the second journal with information that is substantially incomplete. Hence, review forms will have to ask reviewers to place all their views about a manuscript into a set of narrative comments that will be accessible to the authors.

The Consortium does not specify how any journal should announce its membership in NPRC, beyond informing reviewers that their reviews may be forwarded and asking reviewers if they will allow their identities to be revealed with forwarded review. 

NPRC suggests that journals include text like the following in the letters to authors of rejected manuscripts:
"<<journal name>> is a member of the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.  The Consortium is an alliance of neuroscience journals that have agreed to accept manuscript reviews from each other.  If you submit a revision of your manuscript to another Consortium journal, we can forward the reviews of your manuscript to that journal, should you decide this might be helpful.
You can find a list of Consortium journals and details about forwarding reviews at http://nprc.incf.org."

Journals must also agree to look into any issues concerning human or animal subject welfare, conflict of interest, or scientific misconduct, and to resolve those issues to the satisfaction of the editors before any reviews are forwarded. It is unlikely that authors would request that reviews be transferred before such an investigation is complete, but in the event that such a request is made, the first journal should inform the authors and the second journal that the reviews cannot be transferred until an ongoing review of confidential nature is complete.

Consortium journals agree to send on reviews to other Consortium journals when authors request. If an author requests that reviews be transferred, the staff of the first journal should determine from this website (Journals) that the receiving journal is indeed a Consortium member. The reviews (with reviewer identities only if the reviewers have agreed to this) should then be sent to the designated email address for the second journal. (If the reviews are on paper, the designated email address can be notified to identify a FAX number or address to which to send the reviews.) Note that the reviews should include all rounds of review from that journal, as well as any reviews that had been forwarded from a previous journal, so that a complete trail of the progress of that manuscript remains intact. The first journal should not be asked to send on reviews again to a third journal; that would be the responsibility of the second journal, etc.

Each journal will have to configure appropriate means for handling the reviews that they receive from a previous submission to another journal. In some journals that operate from a single office using reviews on paper, this may be as simple as placing the forwarded reviews in a paper file with the manuscript. For more complex journals with multiple levels of editors and electronic review systems, this may require setting up a method for placing the previous reviews into the electronic review system. It will be the responsibility of each journal that joins the consortium to find its own methods for dealing with the forwarded reviews. However, all Consortium journals must agree to maintain the confidentiality of the identities of the reviewers for any reviews that they may receive.