Journals Peer Review Policy

All UCL Press journals follow the high standards of peer review as set out in the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

All research articles and other article types are subjected to thorough peer-review, usually by at least two external peer-reviewers. After initial assessment by the journal Editor for suitability in the journal, the Editor will invite appropriate independent reviewers with sufficient and specific area of expertise. The Editor’s decision is made based on these reviewer reports, which are made available to the authors upon decision. Where the Editor of the journal is an author in the submission, adequate steps are taken to ensure blinding the Editor from the submission during peer-review. Further information about journals’ specific model of peer-review is found on the individual journal’s information pages.

Double blind peer-review

For journals operating double blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review, authors should not include the title page, competing interests, authors’ contributions, any acknowledgements and any authors’ information in the main manuscript file, but should instead be uploaded as part of the covering letter instead.

Single blind or closed peer-review

Reviewers are anonymised to the author(s) and the pre-publication and reviewer reports of the manuscript, upon acceptance, are not published with the article.

Open peer-review

For journals operating open peer review, reviewers and authors names are made available to each other during review and are included in the reviewer reports.