Reviewing for OAJEA
What we ask of a reviewer, from accepting the invitation to submitting your assessment.
Why we ask you#
OAJEA has no editorial staff who can independently judge whether a stress analysis is correct, a control loop is stable, or a dataset supports the conclusion drawn from it. That judgement belongs to people working in the same field as the manuscript, and that is you. A handling editor decides whether a paper is in scope and reads it for overall coherence; the substantive judgement on whether the work is sound comes from review.
What we ask of you#
A review that tells us whether the manuscript's claims are supported by what it presents, written plainly enough that both the editor and the author can act on it. We are not asking you to rewrite the paper, check every unit conversion, or reproduce the experiment. We are asking whether the method fits the question, whether the results back up what the authors say they back up, and whether a reader in the field could follow and, in principle, repeat the work.
Accepting or declining an invitation#
You will receive an email naming the article's title and abstract, but not its authors or their affiliation. Accept only if the topic sits inside your expertise and you have no conflict with the work. Declining costs you nothing and takes seconds; holding an invitation you do not intend to act on costs the author weeks. If you can suggest an alternative reviewer when you decline, do — it is one of the more useful things a reviewer can do for a journal.
Confidentiality#
A manuscript under review is not a public document. Do not share it, discuss its specifics with colleagues, or use unpublished ideas or data it contains in your own work before it is published. This holds whether you accept the assignment or not — declining does not release you from having seen the abstract, but the full manuscript is only sent once you accept.
Conflicts of interest#
Decline, or tell the handling editor before you start, if you have a current or recent collaboration with an author, a financial interest in the outcome, or a personal relationship that would make an honest assessment awkward to give or hard to trust. A conflict does not have to be severe to be worth declaring — the point is that the editor, not you, decides whether it matters.
Double-blind review — what you will and will not see#
OAJEA reviews double-blind. The copy you are sent has had author names, affiliations and self-identifying acknowledgements removed, and is served under a filename that carries no trace of the original. You will not be told who wrote the paper, and the authors will not be told who reviewed it. If the manuscript identifies its authors anyway — an uncredacted acknowledgement, a dataset repository link with the authors' names in the URL, a self-reference such as "as we showed in [12]" — say so in your confidential comments to the editor rather than in the comments the author will read.
Writing the review#
Comments to the author#
These are sent to the author verbatim, labelled only as "Reviewer A" or "Reviewer B", so write them as if the author is reading them cold. Be specific: point to the section, figure or equation you mean, and say what would resolve the concern. A comment the author cannot act on — "the results are weak" — is far less useful than one that names what is missing.
Confidential comments to the editor#
Use this field for anything the author should not see: a suspicion of an identity leak, a concern about data fabrication, or a franker version of your assessment than you want to put in front of the person who wrote the paper. It is never forwarded to the author.
Tone#
Review the work, not the person who did it. A blunt review is not a problem; a review that reads as hostile discourages authors without making the paper any better. Assume the author made the choices they made for reasons — ask what those reasons were rather than assuming carelessness.
Recommendations#
Your recommendation guides the handling editor's decision; it does not make it. The editor may act on it directly or weigh it against a second reviewer's disagreeing view.
| Recommendation | What it means |
|---|---|
| Accept Submission | The work is sound and the paper is ready to move to copyediting essentially as it stands. Minor wording fixes are fine to note, but nothing that requires you to see the manuscript again. |
| Revisions Required | The core work is sound but specific, addressable issues remain — a missing control, an unclear figure, a claim that overreaches the data. You expect a revised version to pass without another full review cycle. |
| Resubmit for Review | The idea has merit but the gaps are substantial enough — additional experiments, reworked analysis, a different framing — that you need to see the revised manuscript again before you could recommend acceptance. |
| Resubmit Elsewhere | The work may well be valid, but it does not fit OAJEA's scope or the venue it needs is a different kind of publication — this is not a judgement on quality. |
| Decline Submission | The work has a fundamental flaw in method, validity or ethics that revision cannot fix, or the claims are not supported by the evidence presented. |
| See Comments | Your assessment does not reduce to one of the above — for example, your recommendation depends on something the editor needs to weigh, such as a second opinion on statistics. Explain the reasoning in your comments to the editor. |
Due dates and reminders#
The invitation states a response deadline and, once you accept, a due date for the review itself. OAJEA sends an automatic reminder once a review passes its due date. If you are going to be late, tell the handling editor rather than letting the deadline pass silently — most delays of a few days are not a problem if we know about them, and reassigning a review late is worse for everyone than reassigning it early.
Reviewer recognition#
Peer review at OAJEA is unpaid and, under double-blind review, deliberately anonymous to the authors. It is not anonymous to the journal: completed reviews are recorded against your account, and on request an editor can confirm to a funder or institution that you reviewed for us in a given period, without naming which manuscripts.