Peer review

[milancurcic]

Here's a proposal for the peer review process for the Fortran Forum. I think the review should be structured, specific, and simple to follow and complete.

Reviewer criteria checklist:

• [ ] Relevant: Is the paper relevant? In other words, is it on topic for the journal?
• [ ] Original: Is the paper original? In other words, has any part of it been published elsewhere?
• [ ] Significant: Does the paper present a significant contribution to the field?
• [ ] Cites prior art: Does the paper cite the appropriate literature? Are all citations accurate?
• [ ] Sound: Are the arguments made in the paper sound?
• [ ] Well written: Is the paper well written in terms of grammar and vocabulary? Does it need significant editing for the language?
• [ ] Software (if the paper presents software):
  • [ ] Does it compile and run as expected?
  • [ ] Is it documented?
  • [ ] Is it publicly available for download?
  • [ ] What is the license of the software?
• [ ] Other comments: (open ended)

Further, I suggest not doing the traditional accept/major rev/minor rev/reject model by reviewers. I think the reviewers should only provide comments on the paper, and the editor should make a decision based on those. The rationale for this is to further minimize the bias coming from reviewers having different internal criteria about what makes a paper publishable.

The review should be in public, with identities of authors and reviewers visible to each other. Reviewers should declare any conflict of interest. Reviewers should be acknowledged explicitly in the paper (i.e. Edited by: ... Reviewed by: ...).

What do you think?

[everythingfunctional]

I think these are all good review criteria. FYI you forgot to finish this sentence:

Are the arguments made in the paper sound? Do the conclusions

But I suspect I have an idea of where it was headed.

I don't have issue with giving the editor final decision on publish vs not. We had discussed framing the review process as more of "help the author(s) get the paper ready to be published" than "is the paper good enough?" The idea being we don't want authors to feel like the paper is being rejected if the reviewers have comments. As long as a paper is relevant we would hope it could eventually be published.

We had discussed the idea of still giving authors the option of having a private review, but encouraging them to make it public. I like the idea of acknowledging the reviewers either way.

[rouson]

@milancurcic I would like to incorporate your list from this issue into the article that this template repository generates and invite you to be a co-author on the article. I'll invite you to be a contributor to the repository. Then I'll incorporate your list and close this issue.

[milancurcic]

@rouson, good plan, let's do it.