Special Issues

Role of the Guest Editor

Generally, Guest editors (GE) will want to go through all of Special Issue submissions, weed out the papers that can be administratively rejected and then assign reviewers to the others. Generating a reviewer pool by confirming with referees ahead of time, even before the submission deadline helps guarantee adherence to our schedule. You will want to ask reviewers to complete and submit their comments to you within a maximum of three weeks upon receiving a copy of the paper. Authors should be instructed to submit their papers via Online Submission System. 

Since the review process for Special Issues should be placed on a fast-track schedule, authors will be given a solid deadline for completing their major and minor revisions, at  one months and two weeks, respectively. Authors should also submit a summary of their changes and responses to the reviewers' original comments. Major revisions should go back to the original reviewers for a second round of reviews with another two week deadline, by ensuring that their original concerns were addressed.

Minor revisions are to be reviewed by the Guest editors (GE) only, unless you need one of the reviewers to ensure that their remaining concern(s) were fully addressed. The authors should be given two weeks to make their minor changes and the GE's should take no more than one week to review them and make final recommendations.

In an effort to adhere to our strict page budget, we are trying to better enforce our long standing page limitations and formatting guidelines with our authors. In order to help them adhere to these guidelines, we need your support by suggesting ways to maintain the lengths of their manuscripts should you decide to ask the author to add new content.  Please offer suggestions as to what they can remove so their manuscripts still adhere to our page limitation and formatting requirements detailed on the author center page.

Deadlines for Special Issues

Because the proposed schedule gives guest editor (GE) essentially three months to complete the peer review process for Special Issue (SI) papers from start-to-finish, we must strongly encourage you follow a faster-paced review schedule by doing the following :

•  Assign reviewers within a weeks of the submission deadlin
• Give reviewers two weeks to review their papers
• Enter recommendations within a weeks of receiving reviews (the ULP receives a week to evaluate your recommendations & enter decisions)
• Give authors two weeks to revise their manuscripts.
• Give reviewers another one weeks to conduct a second review.
• Enter recommendations within a weeks of receiving reviews (the ULP receives a week to evaluate your recommendations & enter decisions)
• Give authors one weeks to make any necessary minor changes before a final recommendation is made
• Enter recommendations within a weeks of receiving minor revisions (the ULP receives a week to evaluate your recommendations & enter decisions)
•  All special issue materials must be received no later than 12 - 15 weeks before the scheduled publication date (depending on the frequency of the publication). 
•  It is important to conduct an initial review before reviewer assignment to weed out poorly written papers or those that are not within scope of the special issue. We also encourage GEs to try and confirm with reviewers ahead of time, so that they know what to expect and agree to the time commitments.  A good opportunity to do this is during the SI's corresponding workshop or conference.