1) Instructions to Editor

The editor will determine the disposition of the manuscript, based on the report of the reviewers, and the editor's own assessment of the manuscript. In cases where revisions (major or minor) are requested, followings are sent to the corresponding author:

  -  All reviewer comments and suggestions

  -  Editor comments

Decisions are as follows:

-  Accept: An accept decision means that an editor is accepting the paper "as is" and with no further changes whatsoever. The paper will not be seen again by the editor or by the reviewers.

-  Minor Revision: The minor version may not go back to the reviewers, if the editor feels the revisions are sufficient / appropriate. Any revision in length by more than 10% should be a major revision.

-  Major Revision: A major revision means that the paper should go back to the original reviewers for a second round of reviews. We strongly discourage editors from making a decision based on their own review of the manuscript if a major revision had been previously required. This may cause problems in the future if reviewers were to see a published paper that they did not have a chance to re-review. If a paper has already gone through two rounds of reviews, the option of a second major revision is not available.

-  Reject: The manuscript is not suitable for publication.

2) Instructions to Reviewer

For a contribution to be acceptable for publication in IJoC as a paper, it should present original work that should not have been published or be under review elsewhere. The novelty will usually lie in original results, methods, observations, concepts, or applications, but may also reside in syntheses of/or new insights into previously reported research. The title, abstract, introduction, and summary should be sufficiently informative to make the contributions of the paper clear to the broadest possible audience, and to place them in context with the related work. In addition to these fundamental requirements, acceptance for publication depends on a number of important criteria relating to reader interest, technical content, and presentation. 

To assist the referee in addressing these criteria, the Review form includes overview in the Section 2 and in open form for detailed comments in the Section 3. The overview is to raise the kind of questions that should be addressed in assessing the paper. In other words, the overview provides a list of the criteria referred to above and, in this sense, serves as a part of these instructions. In addition, the short answers to these questions provide a uniform synopsis of the review for both the editor and the author(s).

The essential part of the evaluation is the information contained in the reviewer's detailed comments in the Section 3. It is hoped that these comments will be guided by the responses indicated in the overview, with emphasis placed on points that substantiate the recommendation to the editor. A recommendation to accept for publication, whether with no changes or with minor revisions, should be reserved for manuscripts that describe novel work and satisfy the readership, content, and presentation criteria indicated in the overview.

If major revisions are recommended, the referee should point these out as specifically as possible and should differentiate changes regarded as optional from those judged as mandatory. If the revisions required are extensive, it is perhaps best to reject the paper and recommend preparation of a "new", heavily revised manuscript for resubmission to IJoC. If a paper is rejected mainly on the basis of reader interest, the reviewer may wish to recommend submission to a more appropriate journal. Papers with little or no salvageable material should be rejected outright and discouraged from later submission.