Review and Referee Process

Your Article in the Public Review Phase

During the public review phase, your article is included in the list of articles presently under review. Questions and comments about the article may arrive at any time; normally by an E-mail message from the area editor. The following are some observations from hos this has worked so far:

It is a good idea to answer quickly to the questions and comments, since then the discussion is more likely to continue with additional interactions. This in turn is in your interest, since it means that you and your article gets more attention.
Remember that it's not in your interest to only get sympathetic comments. It's much better for you if you get tough questions for which you have good answers, than if you only get meek questions.
The ETAI invites authors (without obligation) to submit a summary that is like an abstract, but longer and more concrete. Make use of this opportunity - readers that would not have gone through the whole article may anyway read the summary, and pose interesting questions.

The exact procedure for how you receive questions and submit your answers is specified by each area editor, and may differ between the areas.

Your Article in the Confidential Refereeing Phase

When the reviewing period has ended, usually three months after submission but sometimes slightly more, the area editor asks the author whether he or she wishes to revise the article based on the comments that have been received in the discussion. If the revision only improves on the presentation (making it more pedagogical, easy to understand, etc) then the paper can proceed with the timestamp of its original submission. On the other hand, if the author decides to change some of the essential results, then the article receives a new timestamp. (The timestamp determines in which issue of the ETAI Journal the article will be included, in case of acceptance).

After the the author has made the revision, or decided to keep the paper as it is, the area editor invites two or three confidential referees to make a recommendation whether the article in its present form is to be accepted to the ETAI, or not. This decision should normally not take more than about a month. The ETAI Refereeing Criteria pose clear and well defined questions to the referees, and define the criteria whereby your article will be judged.

In principle, the review discussion ought to provide all the necessary feedback to the author, and the referees should only have to recommend "pass" or "fail" for the article. In practice, it sometimes happens that the confidential referees decide to make additional comments on articles. In such cases, the referee's comments are also posted on the article's Review Protocol Page, but of course without divulging the referee's identity. However, comments of minor importance are only sent to the author and not posted.

You will notice an important difference between the style of ETAI referee reports and the ones in ordinary journals: ETAI referee reports are written collegially, like if the referee had been addressing the author directly and made suggestions to him. This is very far from the authoritarian and judgemental style of referee reports in other journals. This difference in style, together with the openness where everyone can see the exchange of opinions between reviewers, referees, and authors, contribute to creating a good atmosphere for the whole feedback and quality control process in the ETAI.

Revising the Article

After the open review period, you have an option to modify the article in order to use the feedback that has been obtained from the discussion. Please consult the material under the "Format" item in the menue for information about correct formatting of the revised article.

In some cases there may also be feedback from the anonymous referees that motivate changes in the article. This is a bit contrary to the spirit of the ETAI review scheme, since ideally the feedback should be obtained in the open discussion, and the referees should only pass or fail the article. However we are not dogmatic about it, so feedback from referees and post-refereeing revision is also acceptable.

All revisions should be restricted to pedagogical improvements that make the results easier to understand. Improvements of the results must not be included in the article revision process, since this would invalidate the dating of the article. (Remember that articles are consistently dated by the date of first publication of the original version of the article). Instead, new results should be added in new articles or research notes.

In the case of post-refereeing revision, the revised article is only referred to the referees and not to an additional open review process, provided of course that the revision is restricted to pedagogical improvements as just described.

The Acceptance Decision for Your Article

Based on the referees' reports, the Area Editor decides whether to accept or to decline the submitted article. The decision is made openly in either case, and declined articles continue to be visible. We are very careful, of course, to make sure that this happens without undue loss of face. If an article is declined, quite possibly it is because its topic does not correspond to what ETAI wishes to publish, and it does not necessarily imply that the article is "bad". We don't believe there exists a one-dimensional scale of goodness for research articles. Also, "bad" articles are less likely to have been submitted to the ETAI in the first place, exactly because of this open review procedure.

For us, the ideal would be to have a hundred percent acceptance rate, because it would mean that all the submitted articles were good ones. However, since we are not bound to a particular size per volume (an electronic edition is completely elastic...), we will never feel obliged to lower our standards to fill a given number of pages, nor will publication of an article be delayed because there is a backlog.

What happens after an article has been accepted

First, if there have been comments from the confidential referees, the author may wish to revise the paper based on those comments.

Second, it must be arranged that the article is or is put in ETAI standard style, using the Latex style definition. Please click the item for "Formatting" for additional details. We prefer of course if the author does this, but we can usually provide help from the ETAI secretariat, especially if the article is originally in a form other than Latex.

The ETAI secretariat needs to have the article in the following forms:

Latex original
Postscript generated from the Latex
Abstract in plaintext or HTML
Summary in plaintext, HTML, or Latex

Using this, it will generate a file for the body of the article in the form required for a segment of the ETAI (please compare the ETAI Journal pages to see what it looks like in finished form) as well as the introductory pages containing abstract, review history, etc.

The article's appearance in the Journal

The ETAI is published with four issues per year, one issue every three months. The accepted article is included in the ETAI issue corresponding to its datestamp, that is, the date when the article was submitted, unless it has later been revised with respect to the reported results. Within the issue, the articles are included in the order that they are accepted. This procedure has several important consequences:

The official date of publication of an article is not affected by possible publication delays. The date of publication reflects when the results were first made available to the peer community. This is as it ought to be, for priority purposes. It provides the best protection for the authors, without creating an undue rush in the reviewing which might jeopardize quality.
The exact citation of an article is determined immediately when it has been accepted, including the assignment of page numbers. At each point in time, the ETAI webpage can therefore contain the partial contents of the present ETAI issue, namely those contents that have been accepted so far.
There is never any backlog whereby articles are delayed for publication in order to wait their turn. If we have more accepted articles, we publish a bigger volume - that's all there is to it.

Discussion about the Article After Acceptance

The discussion may continue even after the article was accepted or declined. The Review Protocol Page remains for this purpose. If it should later on turn out that the article had been declined incorrectly, then it is possible to reverse the decision, since the original text of the article has been preserved.

Quality Assurance in the ETAI Review Procedure

The present page is intended for anyone who is charged with assessing the quality and merit value of an ETAI published article, for example members of academic promotion committees and officials of research funding agencies. The basic question is: how does an ETAI published article compare with an article published elsewhere?

The following observations may be useful for your decision.

ETAI articles are properly published

The term "electronic" in our name does not mean that articles are only placed on someone's web page and that they can later be changed at random. ETAI articles are published both on paper and electronically, and the electronic versions are subject to a strict set of rules and safety measures to insure that they will remain on-line for an extended period of time, and that they can not be tampered with. The graphical appearance is similar to what you find in any other serious journal.

The term "electronic" for us just indicates that most users will download articles from the net rather than subscribe to physical journal issues from the publisher.

ETAI quality control is more thorough than elsewhere

In order to be accepted to the ETAI, an article has to go through two controls:

Open reviewing during three months, where the article is advertised to the community of researchers in its specialized area, and a public, on-line discussion is organized about its contents.
Confidential refereeing after the open reviewing period has concluded. Here, leading researchers in the specialized area of the article weigh the article as well as the review discussion and decide whether or not to accept the article.

The identity of the referees is confidential, but the review discussion is done openly. Organizing the quality control in this way serves several important purposes:

More feedback to the author.
More reliable checks that previous work has been correctly cited, and that the reported results had not been previously published.
More encouragement to reviewers who contribute actively to the improvement of the article.
Better controls against reviewers/referees who mistakenly reject a valuable article.
Discourages authors from submitting low-quality articles. (In an ordinary journal, noone gets to know if you submitted a rejected article, so it is easy to take chances).

For these reasons, we claim that ETAI's quality control method is superior to the one used in ordinary journals.

More meta-information available in ETAI

The public review discussion used by ETAI is retained and kept on-line even after the acceptance decision has been made. This is important when the merit value of the article is to be assessed, since it makes it possible to do a more precise evaluation than just looking at the title of the journal.

Consider this: If an article has been published in a conventional journal or conference proceedings, then the only information that you can effectively use is the title of the journal and the full text of the article. Given that you won't be able to read all the submitted articles, you can only go by the journal's prestige. We all know that this is a very crude measure of the article's quality, but often it is the only information you have.

If the article has been accepted by the ETAI, however, you are welcome to check the discussion that preceded acceptance. It may contain questions, critical comments and encouraging comments by colleagues, but also the answers by the author(s). The protocol of this discussion will allow you, with minimal effort, to get an idea of how the article was received by the peers.

"But newly started journals need some years to build up quality..."

Yes, for paper journals, because they need to fill their annual quota of a certain number of published pages. In the ETAI, on the other hand, we don't have that constraint since it is made available free of charge over the net. Therefore, we have no reason whatever to compromise quality in order to fill the year's volume. (At the same time, we don't have to maintain a queue of papers awaiting publication - every paper goes into the ETAI as soon as it is accepted).

Who publishes in the ETAI?

Allow us to make one more observation, for the particular case that you are considering an academic promotion. Most likely, you are not only looking for the candidate with the longest list of publications, but also for the candidate with the best potential for continued research. Now, if a young researcher has published articles in the ETAI, what does that say about her or him? We suggest that the candidate is then likely to have the following characteristics:

Likes to try new ideas. The ETAI is an entirely new way of doing scientific publication.
Likes to communicate. The most important difference between being an author in the ETAI and being an author elsewhere is that as an ETAI author you have to interact with colleagues.
Not afraid of debate. After all, if you submit your article to the ETAI, it just may happen that someone comes up with a strong criticism, you have to answer it, and the whole world is watching.
Research interest and curiosity more important than collecting credit points. After all, who knows how future promotion committees will rate ETAI published articles... but this author chose the ETAI anyway, because he or she liked the concept.

If this is the kind of person you would like to recruit, then having published articles in the ETAI must count in favor of this candidate.