Information for Publishers

By permitting their neuroscience journals to participate in the initial one-year pilot Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, publishers offer their editors and reviewers potential savings in time and effort. By reducing the number of times a manuscript must be reviewed, and thus reducing the workload on reviewers, it also should become easier to find new reviewers when necessary. The pilot experience will test whether the reviews for a particular journal are relevant when passed along to another journal.

Publishers also may give their journals the potential benefit of attracting submissions, since authors whose manuscripts were favorably reviewed but not accepted for publication may be more likely to submit next to another journal in the Consortium because of the probability that their papers will be accepted more rapidly. This is particularly true for papers that are “on the edge” in the first choice journal, so that the better papers are the ones most likely to be resubmitted to another journal in the Consortium.

Publishers have no financial, legal, or other obligations to the Consortium beyond their journals’ agreeing to three basic NPRC principles: i) to forward all reviews to another journal in the Consortium upon the author’s request; ii) to configure review forms to eliminate confidential comments to the editors; and, iii) to inform reviewers that their reviews may be forwarded to another Consortium journal, ask whether or not the reviewer’s name should be included with the review, and honor the reviewer’s preference. Of course, the normal rules about maintaining the confidentiality of the identities of the reviewers apply to all reviews, whether solicited or forwarded.

The Consortium does not stipulate any particular process for handling the reviews that journals receive from/forward to another journal. Each journal in the Consortium may decide on its own methods for dealing with the forwarded reviews.

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 ."

Ultimately, by allowing their neuroscience journals to participate in the Consortium, publishers may help their journal editors make early editorial decisions and avoid approaching the same referees. Of course, whether or how to use the reviews received is entirely at the discretion of the editor, and editorial offices are under no obligation to postpone decisions until requested reviews have been forwarded from the first journal.