Systematic Biology Policy on Critiques of Published Papers

Revised 12 August 2003

To improve the consistency of the review process of critiques of previous work, please follow these guidelines. They are based on discussions at the Urbana Associate Editor’s meeting and on experiences with several recent submissions.

POV critiques of earlier work should focus on areas of true disagreement rather than on misunderstandings. Like all of our papers, replies should be constructive and collegial. The AE should aid the authors in clarifying any misunderstanding. The paper being critiqued need not have appeared in SysBio (We have published critiques of Nature, Science, PNAS, etc. papers in the past.) Here are some guidelines:

1) Notify the submitting author that a review will be requested from the person being critiqued and obtain the author’s permission; show the submitting author these policy guidelines. If permission is not granted then we are not obligated to handle the critique (decisions may depend on circumstances).

2) The person being critiqued (hereafter called “Reviewer 3”) must agree to: a) review the critique in a timely manner, and b) sign the review. If Reviewer 3 does not want to go along with these conditions, he or she can decline to see the manuscript.

3) If and only if reviewer 3 agrees to sign the review and reply in a timely manner, send the submission to him or her, and regard their review as a conflict of interest opinion.

4) Reviewer 3 will not be allowed to hold up progress and so must return a review within 4 weeks or by the time the one (required) or two (optional) regular reviews are in.

5) Reviewer 3 may or may not wish to write a publishable reply but should be encouraged to do so. Notify him or her that there is no guarantee that the reply will be published but that it too must be subject to a review.

6) Reviewer number 3 must wait for the revised version of the critique before preparing the final version of his/her reply. To speed the process, the AE, with all of the reviewers' permissions, may forward the non-conflict-of-interest reviews of the critique to reviewer number 3 to assist in preparing a preliminary version of the reply.

7) There is no guarantee that the POV critique, once accepted, will appear in the same issue as the original article but we will try to accomplish this (there are 3 months between submission to the publisher and printing so we have some room to work).

In the case of a series of replies, a mechanism to end the debate is needed. The authors of the first paper to be published in Systematic Biology will be given the right to reply to any response. If the responder then wishes to reply again, this reply shall be in the form of a point-counterpoint in which parties on each side of the debate respond according the to the PCP guidelines (attached and on the web). The debate will then consist of four papers 1) original Systematic Biology paper by author A; 2) critique by author B; 3) response by author A (=Reviewer 3); 4) point-counterpoint by both authors A and B. If the original Systematic Biology paper by author A was sparked by a paper in another journal by author B, paper number one would still be considered to be the first paper to appear in Systematic Biology. The Editor may need to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.