Information for Reviewers

Reviewers for Consortium journals are required to allow the content of their reviews to be forwarded if the authors resubmit their manuscript to another Consortium journal. All Consortium journals agree to keep reviewers anonymous to authors. Reviewers will be offered the option of whether they wish to permit their identity to be revealed to other Consortium journals.

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium strongly encourages the reviewer to permit his or her identity to be revealed to other Consortium journals. Editors will give more weight to reviews from identified reviewers, and if reviewers are unidentified will often be forced to solicit new reviews, creating more work for reviewers and delaying the eventual publication of the manuscript.

Consortium journals will not accept confidential comments from the reviewer to the editor. If authors are to make informed decisions about whether to forward their reviews, they must be able to see all the material that would be forward. 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, reviewers will be required to make all comments (except as described in the next paragraph) on the manuscript accessible to the authors and will not be permitted to include comments in a “confidential comments to editors” section of their review.

Consortium journals will accept confidential comments from reviewers only about human or animal subject welfare, and potential conflicts of interest or misconduct. Issues of this nature must be resolved by the authors to the satisfaction of the editors of the first journal before any reviews are forwarded. Restricting confidential comments to the editors in this way makes the peer review process more transparent and open.