IPAC'19 Light Peer Review Guidance

Alex Bogacz / IPAC'19 Scientific Publication Board Chair / bogacz@jlab.org
Todd Satogata / IPAC'19 Scientific Publication Board / satogata@jlab.org
IPAC'19 Light Peer Review Timelines for reference

Guidelines

These are guidelines for refereeing of IPAC papers for publication in the Institute of Physics (IOP) Conference proceedings series. Three types of criteria have to be considered in order to qualify a paper for publication in this category. A failure to fulfil the criteria under 1) should normally result in the rejection of the paper, deficits under 2) and 3) can be corrected by the authors within a single iteration.
1. Validity and Originality
If the paper contains significant errors and miss-conceptions that result in wrong conclusions and these errors cannot be corrected, the paper must be rejected. If there are strong indications that the presented work was not worked out by the authors and is not original (in the sense that work has originated from the authors), the paper must be rejected.

2. Presentation and Style
The paper must be written in good English. The results must be understandable and be presented in a clear way, in line with scientific standards. Important assumptions and inputs are specified. Previous work should be referenced comprehensively (in the Jacow standard up to one full page is available for references). Graphics, figures, data must be reproduced in good quality with readable text and numbers. Axis units must be indicated where necessary.

3. Content
The relevance of the scientific and engineering content of the paper must be assessed. For the planned type of refereed conference proceedings we request a lower scientific standard as for papers published in a high level journal, such as Physical Review. The work on particle accelerators requires often performance enhancements, technical improvements or engineering work which are very valuable for the field. Our aim is to promote also such publications in this referenced category of IPAC proceedings. Examples of qualifying content are given below:
  • self-performed theoretical analysis or numerical simulation study
  • experimental studies on accelerators, presentation of methodology and results
  • new operational methods, new optimization methods, performance enhancements of facilities, development of new hardware, evolutionary improvements of a facility involving small steps in performance parameters
  • engineering work towards new or improved accelerator devices or instrumentation
  • systematic and scientific description and analysis of problems and observations in accelerator facilities, even if the observations are not understood by a theory
  • proposal of new concepts or new accelerator based facilities
  • review type of paper with a value in combining the results of different studies on a topic in one publication; the review of results, challenges or achievements must be self-performed
The assessment of these criteria is done within an electronic form in order to standardize and streamline the review process.

Instructions for Initial Review

  1. Log into the IPAC'19 SPMS with your profile
  2. A list of privileges may appear. Please do not select any of them, but just click Submit
  3. Click on the Referee Access link:
  4. You should see a screen similar to the following:
  5. Click on the program code corresponding to the paper you want to download and review. You will get a page listing the abstract and details of the paper, including an activity log:
  6. Click the Download link, then click Get this next to the Autodistilled PDF (or author PDF if autodistill is unavailable) to download the PDF of the paper for review.
  7. Review the paper, following the guidelines above.
  8. Return to the paper list screen and click Set Status:
  9. Answer all seven questions and decide on the paper's status:
    • If all answers are yes, then the status should be set Green
    • If any of 1-3 are no then the paper is not correctable and the status should be set Red
    • If answers 1-3 are yes, but one or more of 4-7 are no then the paper may be correctable.
      • Are the corrections straightforward? If so, set the status to Yellow. Otherwise, set the status to Red.
    • Enter requested corrections and comments to the author in the text box on the left. Enter comments to the Scientific Publication Board in the text box on the right. For example, if the paper was outstanding, then you may want to recommend to the SPB that a longer version be considered for referral to the PRAB special edition.
  10. After entering the review information and continuing, you should return to the paper list screen with a new indication of your review in the Referee Status area
  11. Repeat the above process for other papers assigned for your review.

Instructions for Second Review

In the case you have requested revisions from the authors as a yellow dot, you must perform a second review to determine whether the revisions are appropriate for the paper to be accepted or declined. Authors have been instructed that there is only time for ONE iteration of review in this process.

You should follow the above process again to access and download the revised version of the paper. However, this time you should only select Green status (if all requests have been satisfactorily addressed) or Red status (if the requests have not been satisfactorily addressed). There is no further iteration of review due to the compressed timeline of IPAC light peer review.
Last update: May 2 2019