 policies with peer review and do you follow blind peer review, open peer review? What is your policy right now? So our policy right now is single blind peer review, so the reviewers know who the author is, but the author does not know who the reviewers are. So it is a closed system. We have been having conversations about open peer review, so that is something that we've been talking about. Yesterday I attended the committee on publication ethics and they had a great talk around open peer review. So they have a working discussion document, so that's something that, you know, that's a good example of what one of my tasks or job, what my job is, is to take those types of things that are being discussed and to think about them and to see what the editors are thinking and where they want to go. So right now we're very traditional, you know, our peer review process is confidential, and so the reviewer knows who the author is, but the author does not know who the reviewer is. What is the benefit of this particular money? That's a good question. What's the benefit of a single blind? I guess it's just keeping the whole process confidential, so reviewers know that the manuscript is confidential and they can't talk about it to anybody. But would authors want to know who the reviewers are? That's a great question. And would the reviewers want the authors to know? If it is open peer review, would the reviewers do a better job reviewing the paper? That's a great question. So I don't know if I even have an answer to that question, what the benefit is. I think it's one of those things that has always been done, which is sort of a lot of what we do, but that's not to say that's the best way going forward. So it is something that we're looking at. And hopefully things like the Committee on Publication Ethics and, you know, they have a peer review Congress coming up next year in Chicago in 2017. Maybe somebody will start looking at this and doing some research about it. It would be great to see people who have done it get a little data about what they're doing. That's a good point. Yeah, so we'll see. What is your opinion about giving credit to peer reviewers? So I think that's important, and it's something that we do. What we do at our journal is at the end of the year, which I think is something a lot of journals do. We publish the names of our reviewers at the back of our journal and thanking them for their efforts. And we also, for reviewers who are sort of in the top 10%, you know, they've turned things around quickly, they've submitted excellent reviews, we actually send them a special letter saying, you know, thank you so much for reviewing for a journal. You've identified as being in the top 10%. We hope you'll share this letter with your chair. So, and we've got some good feedback. People really like that. So I think as much as you can within a system that's confidential and closed, I think, as much credit and thanks you can give to your reviewers the best, the better it is. So when a paper gets rejected, what I have noticed is that some journals just send a paragraph saying the journal is rejecting a manuscript because of one or two reasons that are specific to the paper. In certain cases, I've seen journals actually send a checklist with, you know, different aspects, okay, title, abstract, clarity of science. And then there are specific comments right next to each other. Interesting. So there's a lot of diversity, the way in which different journals communicate the reasons for why a paper got rejected. What, according to you, is a best practice when it comes to explaining an author while a paper got rejected? Well, that's a great question. For us, it's, if it's been sent out for peer review, to be sure to include all of those comments of the peer reviewers. And what we ask our peer reviewers to do actually is to number their points and to refer to line numbers within the article so that it can be very clear to the author what they're talking about and so that makes it more actionable. So we're trying to just be as clear as possible in our, in our, in our letters back to our authors. So rejection letters, revision letters. We don't have a checklist. I'm sure that works for some journals. They're probably, they're probably not as standard because all the journals are so different and they have different number of staff. You know, they have, some have a staff of one who wears all the hats, editor-in-chief to editorial assistant. But then you have other journals that have an army of people working for them. So I think it probably just depends on the, on the journal itself. And there's probably not one best way to do it, but I certainly, the more information you can give people, the clearer it is, the better. So. That's a really good point. A lot of times foreign authors, especially, they don't understand the reasons why the paper was rejected. Or maybe I think even managing editors or the person corresponding with the author does not really understand because of the language barrier. Yeah. Well the author is trying to say and that can create a lot of confusion. So the more information you can give to the authors that would really help them. And like we covered in the next, you know, the previous question that how can they then take the steps forward so if the paper's got rejected and how do they handle that, then that would again help them. Right. It also, it also makes me think that on our side, the editorial office, what we have to do too is think about how we're communicating to authors and make sure it's clear because, you know, writing day to day you can become very informal and use, you know, expressions that aren't make no sense to someone, you know, whose first language is not English. So that's something that we have to work on ourselves and be aware of and to be careful about. And that just, you made me think of that when you were talking about authors not understanding. And then there's being the communication problem because both sides are having trouble talking. And I think that's something that's sort of something that we have to be careful of too. So it's not just the author having to worry about transforming a manuscript or corresponding in English, but we too have to be aware and careful about how we're talking to an author and make sure that we're being very clear in our correspondence. Yeah, I agree. A lot of times when we are busy with our day to day work, we start using some jargons that are very specific to our work or our profile and someone from the outside may not be able to understand what do you really mean by that. Yes. My staff, I tried to just make sure that they are communicating with people quickly, effectively and, you know, congenially and just, you know, if something's not clear, we try to go back and clarify it. And I hope that authors would feel the same that they could do that as well. They come to us and say, you know, you've said this. Can you clarify this? So hopefully the authors will feel that they have that right and ability to do that as well. So do you provide any resources to authors when a paper is rejected saying that these are a couple of resources that you can turn to and these will help you or guide you with your next steps? I don't, you know, we don't provide resources to authors if we reject them. I think the peer reviews, what we do is just let them stand on their own and hope that the authors will incorporate them into the next iteration of their manuscript before submitting it to someone else. But usually we don't. I mean, there might be special cases where it was almost something but not quite, right? And so the editor might have very specific, might have very specific recommendation for the author and so they might put that in the letter. But overall, hopefully the authors will take those reviews and make their paper better for whatever they decide to do with it next.