Purpose and Scope
Peer review provides expert advice to support editorial assessment of scholarly work. This policy establishes Treata-wide expectations for review integrity while allowing journals to define and publish their specific review model, reviewer number expectations, workflow, and discipline-appropriate procedures.
Peer review is advisory. Final responsibility for editorial decisions remains with the editor or authorized editorial body.
Journal Review Model and Transparency
Each journal should state its peer-review model clearly, such as single-anonymized, double-anonymized, open, or another defined model. Journals should also describe material features of the process that authors and reviewers need to understand.
Review models should not be represented as providing guarantees they cannot provide. Anonymity, for example, can reduce some forms of identification but may not make identity inference impossible.
Reviewer Selection
Editors should select reviewers on the basis of relevant expertise, independence, and ability to provide a useful assessment. Bibliographic tools, reviewer databases, recommendations, and automated systems may assist selection, but editors remain responsible for evaluating suitability.
Author-suggested or opposed reviewers may be considered according to journal policy, but such suggestions do not determine reviewer appointment.
Reviewer Responsibilities
Reviewers should assess manuscripts within their competence, provide constructive and sufficiently reasoned comments, distinguish evidence-based concerns from preference, and avoid personal, discriminatory, coercive, or irrelevant criticism.
Reviewers should alert editors to significant integrity concerns, substantial overlap, missing information, or other issues that may affect the reliability or evaluation of the work, while avoiding unsupported allegations in comments intended for authors.
Confidentiality and Use of Manuscripts
Manuscripts, review invitations, correspondence, and unpublished information obtained through peer review should be treated as confidential except where the journal’s declared review model provides otherwise. Review material must not be used for personal, competitive, commercial, or scholarly advantage before lawful public availability.
Reviewers must not upload confidential manuscripts or identifiable manuscript content to external AI systems or other services when doing so would breach confidentiality, privacy, contractual, or journal requirements.
Competing Interests
Reviewers should disclose interests that could affect or reasonably appear to affect independent judgment and should decline the review or seek editorial guidance when appropriate. Editors should also manage their own conflicts and reassign manuscripts when recusal is necessary.
A prior professional relationship does not automatically constitute a disqualifying conflict in every field; relevance, recency, closeness, and the nature of the relationship should be considered.
Artificial Intelligence in Peer Review
AI tools may assist limited aspects of review only when their use is compatible with confidentiality, data protection, intellectual-property obligations, and journal requirements. Reviewers remain personally responsible for the content, accuracy, fairness, and reasoning of the review they submit.
AI-generated assessment must not substitute for a reviewer’s own expert evaluation, and confidential manuscript material should not be exposed to unapproved systems.
Integrity and Manipulation
Fabricated reviewer identities, compromised accounts, undisclosed review by another person, coordinated review rings, coercive citation practices, inappropriate author-reviewer contact, or manipulation of reviewer recommendations may undermine the process and require investigation.
Automated or pattern-based indicators should be treated as signals for assessment, not as standalone proof of manipulation.
Editorial Use of Reviews
Editors should consider the substance and quality of reviews rather than mechanically counting recommendations. Conflicting reviews may require editorial judgment, clarification, an additional reviewer, or specialist advice.
Editors may disregard reviews that are abusive, irrelevant, seriously conflicted, unreliable, or inconsistent with journal standards. Reviewer advice does not bind the editor to a particular decision.
Communication, Revision and Reviewer Recognition
Authors should receive appropriate reviewer and editorial comments needed to understand the basis for revision or decision, subject to confidentiality and integrity considerations. Authors should respond substantively to requested revisions and explain respectfully when they do not adopt a recommendation.
Reviewer recognition, acknowledgements, certificates, or external review-credit services may be offered where compatible with confidentiality and the journal’s review model.
Journal Implementation and Version Control
The publisher-level requirements in this policy are mandatory. The journal-specific elements—including review model, typical reviewer number, review rounds, timelines, transfer procedures, and whether review reports may be published—must be configured and communicated by each journal rather than assumed.
Material policy changes should be versioned. Journal-specific review settings should also remain historically identifiable where they materially affect submissions handled under an earlier configuration.
Version Control
Version 1.0. This page is the canonical publisher-level policy text for the current version. Material revisions should receive a new version or effective date, and superseded versions should remain identifiable so that the policy applicable at an earlier point in the publication lifecycle can be determined.