Peer review at SciRepo

We welcome negative results, replications, incremental advances and specialist findings alongside more conventional research articles. Each manuscript is assessed on the integrity of its design, methods, analysis, interpretation and reporting—not on a subjective prediction of its impact.

Authors submit complete publication information, including author affiliations, funding sources, competing interests and five potential reviewers. Every named author must hold a SciRepo account and explicitly confirm their authorship before the manuscript can progress. This creates a clear record of consent and accountability from the start.

Before invitations are opened, the manuscript moves through editorial screening. The workflow is designed to include similarity screening, reference checks and checks on reviewer suitability. Proposed reviewers are assessed for credible subject-matter expertise, while potential conflicts are flagged—for example, where an author and reviewer share an email domain.

These safeguards are not intended to replace editorial judgement. They create a consistent first line of scrutiny, with the editor retaining responsibility for whether a manuscript and its reviewer panel are suitable to proceed. Integrations for similarity and automated reference validation are being introduced progressively; we will be explicit about their status as the platform develops.

SciRepo uses single-anonymous review. Reviewers can see author information needed to assess expertise, conflicts and context; authors do not see reviewer identities. Reviewer invitations are tied to the email address invited. A reviewer must create or sign in to a verified SciRepo account using that address before accepting and accessing the manuscript.

Two reviewers are required to accept before formal review begins. Invitations close after two acceptances and expire after four weeks. If two reviewers cannot be secured within that period, the manuscript is closed with the stated reason: No response from reviewers. This keeps submissions from disappearing into an indefinite queue.

Reviewers recommend acceptance, acceptance with corrections, or rejection, supported by their feedback. Authors receive the feedback, respond to it and submit revisions where needed. The process can continue for up to five rounds, allowing genuine scientific dialogue without allowing a submission to become permanently unresolved.

If both reviewers accept, the manuscript moves to editorial production. If one reviewer rejects, the submission is rejected under the current decision model. If a decision cannot be reached after five rounds, the manuscript is closed with the stated reason: Unable to reach consensus. Accepted work then proceeds to publication preparation, DOI registration and open-access HTML publication.

A credible review process needs more than an email exchange. SciRepo is building structured authorship confirmation, verified reviewer access, defined decision points, recorded revision rounds and clear outcomes into the workflow itself. These steps make the process easier to follow for authors, reviewers and editors alike.

We are a young journal and will earn trust through transparent practice, consistent standards and a willingness to improve. The ambition is not to make review lighter. It is to make robust, method-led peer review available without asking researchers to pay to participate.