Reviewer Guidelines

As is the case with any peer-reviewed journal, academic reviewers play a crucial role in the editorial process of Scholarly Research Exchange. However, there are a few important differences that distinguish the transparent review process used by Scholarly Research Exchange from the traditional "blind" peer review process used by many scholarly journals.

In addition to the reviewers that are selected by the journal's Editorial Office, authors of submitted manuscripts are asked to suggest a number of potential reviewers who would be appropriate to review their manuscript. The Editorial Office of the journal assesses these suggested reviewers based on their seniority within the subject area of the manuscript. There are different ways the journal uses to make sure the reviewers are of adequate seniority including, among other factors, the h-index of the reviewers. There are also several requirements: the reviewers must not be from the same institute as the manuscript's authors, must not have co-authored any article with the manuscript's authors during the last 3 years, and must be geographically dispersed. In addition, in order to keep the system as distributed as possible, reviewers will not be allowed to review too many articles for Scholarly Research Exchange, and they should not review more than one manuscript for the same author in any 12-month period.

The transparent peer review system used by Scholarly Research Exchange publicly acknowledges the reviewers' contribution to the peer review process and enables them to publish a written commentary that will be displayed alongside the article if they choose to do so. This model of transparent peer review provides the journal's readers with a more in-depth analysis of each published article, and it enables reviewers to present a more nuanced evaluation of the articles that they review. The system also publicly acknowledges the important contributions of peer reviewers in the review process.

Another important aspect of the editorial model used by Scholarly Research Exchange is that the acceptance of an article is entirely dependent on the evaluations made by the peer reviewers. In addition to any written comments that a reviewer makes, each review report includes a rating of the article on a scale from zero to five stars, with the following meanings:

	Outstanding Quality
	Minimum Publishable Quality
	Erroneous or Useless

In order for a manuscript to be accepted for publication, it must receive at least two review reports which rate it as one star or more, and the average rating from all of the submitted review reports must be at least one star. Once a manuscript has received review reports that satisfy these requirements, the manuscript's authors will have the choice of either submitting a revised version of the manuscript for review, withdrawing their manuscript from the journal's review system, or moving ahead with the publication of their article. Once an article is published, the comments and evaluations made by each of the peer reviewers will be published on the journal web site, along with the names of each reviewer.