About

The peer review process for EJSSM is much like that for other formal scientific journals, with some minor differences in keeping with the nature of the electronic medium. It is our goal that the submission, review and publishing process take advantage of the efficiency and faster turnaround of the e-journal system, while maintaining the high standards of excellence of traditional, formal, scientific journals. As with all formal scientific journals, peer review is necessary and required in order to optimize overall quality and scientific robustness of the final published draft of accepted papers. EJSSM is committed to high scientific standards, treating publication as a collaborative process between Author, Reviewers and Editors. Here "Author" refers to the corresponding author who is responsible for handling submission and revision of a manuscript, and who may or may not be lead author. Authors are encouraged to refer to the Reviewer Guidelines and Editors' Guidelines for a detailed description of the roles and expectations EJSSM has of its Reviewers and Editors. Authors and reviewers each are reminded that both reviews and responses will become part of the open access public record associated with each manuscript, freely available online once the paper has passed review and is accepted by the Editor. Here are the steps of the review process:

1. The Author establishes an EJSSM login account (if he/she doesn't already have one) and submits his/her paper through the online portal, in one of the accepted file formats.

2. The EJSSM server e-mails an automated notice to the Editor informing him/her of the submission and its location in the EJSSM web server.

3. The Editor views the submission and evaluates it for English comprehensibility and for compliance with basic EJSSM standards for formatting, length and style as outlined in the Author's Guide. EJSSM Editor(s) will not put a paper into review if the English presentation is poorly comprehensible, the paper is incomplete or too big, or the basic formatting is incorrect. Such a submission will be returned to the author without further review, and may be resubmitted once the basic pre-review problems have been addressed.

4. The Editor evaluates the subject matter of the submission and accordingly contacts potential reviewers based on his/her judgment of their expertise and skill in evaluating some or all of the content in the submission. The Editor may consult a diverse roster of potential reviewers that he/she maintains in order to streamline the reviewer recruitment process, but is not restricted to that list.

5. The Editor uses a portal in the EJSSM server to relay the submission to the Reviewers. If any Reviewer(s) decline to perform the review, alternates will be consulted until at least two Reviewers are set for the paper. Typically, a submission will have three Reviewers, but more may be recruited as appropriate for the material.

6. Each Reviewer independently evaluates the manuscript according to the criteria explicitly stated in the Review Guidelines, normally within 2-3 weeks. Each Reviewer annotates the document with his/her general and specific comments and makes one of the following recommendations to the Editor through the EJSSM server:

• Accept in present form.
• Accept with minor revisions, no further review requested unless major changes are made in accordance with other reviews (at the discretion of the Editor).
• Accept with minor revisions, but send the revised manuscript back for further review.
• Accept with major revisions, automatic further review of the manuscript unless the reviewer requests otherwise.
• Reject. Further review of the manuscript by a Reviewer is possible if the Editor decides against the reviewer’s rejection recommendation, unless that Reviewer requests otherwise. Any manuscripts rejected by the Editor, whether or not on advice of Reviewers, will go no further in the process; future versions of such work must be resubmitted for initial review as in Step 1.

7. Once reviews are complete, the Editor returns reviews and comments electronically to Author (through the EJSSM interface) for revision of the manuscript, as necessary based on those recommendations and the Editor's judgment. In that message, the Editor will set a reasonable deadline for receiving the revised manuscript. If the reviews are generally favorable and include only minor suggestions, that deadline could be as short as 2 weeks. If major changes are required, it could be up to 1–2 months. Extensions to the Editor’s deadline can be granted at the Editor’s discretion to accommodate an author’s circumstances. Failure to meet the deadline will result in the author having to submit the revised paper as a new submission.

8. The Author revises and submits the manuscript for second review using his/her EJSSM account. Once the Author is logged in, the EJSSM web interface will display the revision stage to the author for each paper he/she has in review. This process repeats until the Editor decides that the paper has satisfied the review process and is ready for publication.

9. If accepted, the Editor notifies the Author and Reviewers using the EJSSM interface, which sends e-mails as needed.

10. Cost to the author for an accepted manuscript is $50 for up to 50MB. Cost for larger files is determined on a case-by-case basis.

11. The accepted paper is uploaded to the server by an Editor, along with the substantive portion of the Reviewers' comments. Exceptions to any Author or Reviewer timetable will be handled on a case by case basis at Editor's discretion. It is important to remember that the Editor, not the Reviewers, makes the final decision on the degree and nature of revision needed, and whether a paper ultimately is published. However, his/her responsibility as Editor is to consider the advice of the reviewers in making that decision.

First and foremost, the goal of the review process is to improve the scientific quality of the submission. Reviewers will work with the author through a collaborative process to ensure scientific integrity. Constructive criticism is a necessary part of this collaborative effort and as such shall be offered and received in a professional manner.

Authors and reviewers are reminded that both reviews and responses will become part of the open access public record associated with each manuscript.

For a comprehensive guide specific to reviews and the peer-review process please read the complete EJSSM Review Guidelines online.

Material to be published in EJSSM will be uploaded and appear on the website immediately after acceptance by the Editor.

For recordkeeping purposes, however, EJSSM volumes are numbered yearly, beginning with Volume 1 in 2006.

Accepted papers are numbered in the order they are uploaded. For example, the fifth paper of 2006 (Volume 1), if twelve pages long, would be referenced as in this example:

Author, A. A., 2006: My paper's title. Electronic J. Severe Storms Meteor., 1(5), 1-12.

EJSSM publishes articles by copyright-holder consent to Open Access, meaning it does not require the abolition, reform, or infringement of copyright law. Nor does EJSSM require that copyright holders waive all the rights that run to them under copyright law and assign their work to the public domain.

By submitting texts to EJSSM, copyright holders consent to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work.

Most authors choose to retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. Some choose to block commercial re-use of the work. Essentially, these conditions discourage plagiarism, misrepresentation, and sometimes commercial re-use, and authorize all the uses required by legitimate scholarship, including those required by the technologies that facilitate online scholarly research.

Unless otherwise noted, EJSSM assumes the most current CC-BY-ND Creative Commons license, an easy, effective way for copyright holders to manifest their consent to Open Access. Many other open-content licenses will also work. Copyright holders may also compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their works.

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

For a comprehensive guide specific to Editors for EJSSM, please read Review Editor Guidelines online.

For a list of our founders and board, please click here.