A manuscript sent to you for review is a confidential document. It is unpublished work that its authors have entrusted to Peer Academics, and the journal has passed it to you for one purpose only: to advise the editor on whether it should be published. Accepting a review invitation is your agreement to the rules on this page. They apply from the moment you receive the invitation and do not expire when the review is over.
What you must not do
- Do not show the manuscript to anyone. Not a colleague, not a co-author, not a student, not a research group, not a mailing list or social network. The only exception is a co-review approved in advance by the editor, under the conditions below.
- Do not discuss the manuscript or its existence. Do not tell anyone that a particular piece of work is under review at this journal, and do not reveal the outcome, which is the authors' to announce.
- Do not upload the manuscript, its abstract, its data, its figures, or any part of it to a generative artificial intelligence service. Pasting the text of a manuscript under review into a chatbot, a writing assistant, a translation service that retains input, a summarizer, or any comparable tool is a breach of confidentiality, because it discloses unpublished work to a third party you do not control and may add it to a training corpus. This applies to paid, free, and institutional services alike. It also applies to your own report while the manuscript is unpublished. Language assistance for your report is acceptable only in tools that process text locally and retain nothing, and any use of an artificial intelligence tool connected to the review must be described in the declarations part of the review form, as the Generative AI Policy requires.
- Do not use the work for your own purposes. You may not use the data, methods, results, arguments, or wording of a manuscript you have reviewed in your own research, teaching, grant applications, or writing before publication, and you may not act on the information it contains — for example by starting a competing study, by changing what you submit elsewhere, or in any decision on funding, appointments, or peer review of related work.
- Do not keep or circulate copies. Do not deposit the manuscript in shared drives, group repositories, reference managers that sync to shared libraries, or annotation platforms.
Co-reviewing with a colleague
Involving a junior colleague in a review can be good training, but it is not your decision alone. Ask the editor before you share anything. If the editor agrees, the co-reviewer is bound by this page in full, you remain responsible for the report, and you must name the co-reviewer to the editor so that their contribution is recorded. An unapproved co-review is a breach, however well intentioned.
Other reviewers' reports
When a decision is made, the journal sends you the other reports on the same manuscript with their authors' names removed. Those reports are confidential in the same way as the manuscript. Do not circulate or quote them.
After the review
When you have submitted your report, destroy the working copies you hold: delete the files and shred any printout. Keep nothing beyond what the journal system stores for you. If the manuscript is later published, you are free to read, cite, and discuss the published version like any other reader, but you remain bound to silence about the review itself — that you reviewed it, what you recommended, and what the manuscript contained before publication. If you wish to discuss your review publicly after publication, ask the editor first.
Requests from third parties
If anyone outside the editorial process asks you about a manuscript under review — an author, an institution, a funder, a journalist, an employer — do not answer. Refer them to [email protected] and tell the editor that the request was made. Do not contact the authors directly at any point, before or after the decision.
If confidentiality is breached
Tell the editor at once if a manuscript you hold has been disclosed, including by accident: a file left on a shared drive, a message sent to the wrong recipient, text pasted into an online tool. Prompt disclosure is treated far more leniently than a breach the journal discovers on its own.
The editor decides what follows. Depending on the seriousness, the journal may remove your report from consideration, assign a new reviewer, remove you from the reviewer pool permanently, inform the authors that their work was disclosed, and, where the breach involved appropriation of unpublished work, raise the matter with your institution or employer. Every permanent removal from the reviewer pool is recorded in the journal's editorial records, and the decision is the editor's alone.
These rules are informed by the principles of the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers and of ICMJE; Peer Academics is not a member of either organization. How the journal processes your own personal data as a reviewer is described in the Privacy Statement.