Peer Review Process

The manuscript submitted to the Journal of Integrative Natural Science (JoINS) management system is evaluated by the editors and section editors within three weeks at the latest. The manuscripts are critically evaluated based on the journal’s submission criteria:

  • Scope of the journal and appropriateness to the field of study
  • Evaluation of the similarity
  • Appropriateness to the writing rules
  • Publication language

The manuscript passed from pre-assessment of editors and fields editors are forwarded to at least two referees anonymous referees who are specialized in the field concerned for contribution, originality, relevance, and presentation. In the review process, JoINS involves writers, editors, section editors, and reviewers. In the review process, JoINS applies the Double-Blind Review model to maintain confidentiality.

There are no communications between authors and reviewers during the reviewing process. Also, there are no communications between authors and editors regarding the rejection decision.

Authors whose papers are accepted, revised, rejected will be informed with the results from the reviewers.

The steps for the reviewing process are in the following figure.

In short, the steps are:

  1. Manuscript Submission (by author) (step 1)
  2. Manuscript Check and Selection (by manager and editors) (step 2). Editors have a right to directly accept, reject, or review. Prior to further processing steps, plagiarism check using turtitin is applied for each manuscript.
  3. Manuscript Reviewing Process (by reviewers) (step 3-4)
  4. Notification of Manuscript Acceptance, Revision, or Rejection (by editor to author based on reviewers comments) (step 5)
  5. Paper Revision (by author)
  6. Revision Submission based on Reviewer Suggestion (by author) with similar flow to point number 1. (step 1)
  7. If reviewer seems to be satisfied with revision, notification for acceptance (by editor). (step 6)
  8. Galley proof and publishing process  (step 7 and 8)

The steps point number 1 to 5 is considered as 1 round of peer-reviewing process. And, our reviewing process at least goes through 2 round of reviewing process.

The journal editor or editorial board considers the feedback provided by the peer reviewers and arrives at a decision. The following are the most common decisions:

  1. Accept without any changes (acceptance): the journal will publish the paper in its original form
  2. Accept with minor revisions (acceptance): the journal will publish the paper and asks the author to make small corrections
  3. Accept after major revisions (conditional acceptance): the journal will publish the paper provided the authors make the changes suggested by the reviewers and/or editors
  4. Revise and resubmit (conditional rejection): the journal is willing to reconsider the paper in another round of decision making after the authors make major changes
  5. Reject the paper (outright rejection): the journal will not publish the paper or reconsider it even if the authors make major revisions