Even though this open access paper was published in 2019, we thought it useful to include in the Resource Library. Ethical and timely peer review is so essential to healthy scientific publishing. Publishers must invest resources and have systems to keep peer reviews happening as quickly as possible and to prompt slow reviewers to submit their comments as quickly as possible. There are two obvious challenges here, finding and recruiting expert and well-read reviewers, and that few research institutions recognise, much less incentivise the time staff need to conduct quality reviews. This is a research culture issue that institutions need to take seriously.
Today there are many peer-reviewed established international journals where scholars can submit their research works. There are a variety of factors that affect the authors’ choices of the target journals.1 In addition to the reputation of the journal in some specific research areas and its impact factor, the short reviewing process time is another important parameter for scholars to choose the right journal to submit their manuscripts. However, unfortunately a large number of prestigious journals are not concerned about the duration of the peer review. A long review process may not be an issue for the journals, but it causes the authors some troubles. We are living in a century of technology and time plays an important role in our lives. When the evaluation comments get back after a long time, there could be a possibility that the idea of the research is not as novel as the time when the work has been submitted. There is also a more important issue which should be noticed. When the review comments are not returned back in due time, there is a possibility that the invited reviewer does not submit the evaluation results in a timely manner intentionally so that he could have sufficient time to publish that original research in another journal as if it is his own work. This is exactly what happened to one of our recent works published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research journal.2 The reviewing process of the submitted paper took about nine months. After the publication of the original research, one day I accidentally noticed that the same work has been published into another international journal by…
Mehregan M. (2019) Ethical Reviewers are Essential for Scholarly Journals for Timely Processing of Submissions and Avoiding Retractions. Journal of Korean Medical Science. 34(5):e41.
Publisher (Open Access): https://jkms.org/DOIx.php?id=10.3346/jkms.2019.34.e41 b
