All submitted manuscripts will undergo a four-step review process: preliminary check, plagiarism check, independent peer review, and editorial peer review.  

Preliminary check: All manuscripts will be reviewed by the editorial office first for compliance with  the Manuscript preparation guidelines. Articles that do not comply with the guidelines will be sent back to the authors to ensure compliance.

Plagiarism check: Manuscripts that are in compliance with the guidelines will be checked for plagiarism. We work with CrossRef to use iThenticate to detect plagiarism. iThenticate gives a 'similarity index', which is the word-by-word copying of materials from previously published literature. We use similarity index to make a decision. Manuscripts with more than 10% similarity index will be returned to the authors without peer review for corrective action. For articles with similarity index between 1-10%, we follow the guidelines of Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) on text recycling to make a decision. Manuscripts that pass the plagiarism check will be subjected to expert peer review. 

Independent peer review: Chapters that pass the preliminary and plagiarism checks will undergo single-blind independent peer review by at least one expert on the topic. Based on the assessments, the reviewer(s) will make one of the following decisions: (i) no further comments; (ii) minor revision required; (iii) major revision required; or (iv) reject. Chapters that require major revision will be returned to the authors for corrective action. 

Editorial peer review: Chapters that are categorized under “no further comments” or “minor revision required” by the independent reviewers will be sent to the editor of the book, along with the comments of the reviewers, for editorial peer review. Based on the assessments, the editor will decide whether to accept the comments of the independent reviewers as such or add further comments for the authors to address. After the editorial peer review, the articles will be sent to the authors for revision and resubmission. The editor will verify the resubmitted manuscripts for compliance. Once the editor is satisfied with the final version, the editor will notify the publisher. The editor's decision is final. The publisher neither influences nor interferes with editorial decisions.

Chapters written by the editors: Chapters written by the editors will be independently reviewed by at least two experts in the field. The editors are required to address all comments of the reviewers. The resubmitted chapters will be verified by the reviewers for compliance before making a final decision.

Publication               

After acceptance, the chapters will be copy-edited and sent for production. The chapters will be published online in three different formats: pdf, html, and xml. They will be open access, freely available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).  The authors will retain the copyright of their work. The book will be assigned an ISBN. Each chapter will be assigned a doi and deposited with CrossRef. 

Indexing

An application to NCBI/NIH/NLM Bookshelf will be made for possible indexing as described here.