Editorial Policies

Peer Review Policy

Peer Review Process

The TSMJ uses a double-blind peer review process, which means that the peer reviewer and author identities are concealed from both peer reviewers and authors throughout the review process (Section Editors participate in the review but are not blinded).  

Initial Reception: Initial submissions are initially screened by the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor and provisionally accepted for review or rejected. Following provisional acceptance, the Managing Editor is responsible for blinding all submission materials and assigning each article to a Section Editor.

Peer Review: Peer review at UTMJ is performed by Peer Reviewers, who conduct a double-blinded review of submissions and return reviews using standardized templates for the article type. Section editors are responsible for choosing 2–3 Peer Reviewers based on personal and professional interest and experience with the subject matter of the article in question. Section Editors are also responsible for synthesising their own and Peer Reviewer comments and making a recommendation for article decisions: either Accepted (as is), Conditional Acceptance (pending revisions), Revisions Requested, or Rejected.

Article Decisions: The Managing Editor is then responsible for making their own recommendation for article decisions, as well as reaching a decision for each article with the Editor-in-Chief. In cases of any dispute between editors regarding recommended article decisions, the rest of the Editorial Team may be consulted to reach a decision.

Reviewer Feedback: Section Editors are responsible for conveying blinded reviewer comments to authors, along with the article decision. If an article decision requires revisions, authors are required to respond to all reviewer comments upon resubmission of the edited manuscript, along with tracked changes.

Article Re-Submission: Re-submitted articles are sent for another round of review to confirm that revisions have been adequately addressed to allow for article publication. Following this, Section Editors may communicate the final decision to authors and the Editorial Team, or request additional revisions.

Article Acceptance: Accepted articles are sent for copyediting and may still be subject to revisions to ensure that articles are compliant with TSMJ house style and formatting guidelines.

Responsibilities of Peer Reviewers

Reviewers (Editors or Peer reviewers) are required to abide by the following guidelines:

Confidentiality: Manuscripts submitted to journals are privileged communications that are authors’ private, confidential property, and authors may be harmed by premature disclosure of any or all of a manuscript’s details. Reviewers must keep manuscripts and the information they contain strictly confidential. Reviewers must not publicly discuss authors’ work and must not appropriate authors’ ideas before the manuscript is published. Reviewers must not retain the manuscript for their personal use and should destroy copies of manuscripts after submitting their reviews. Confidentiality may be breached in the event of alleged dishonesty or fraud, but editors should notify authors or reviewers if they intend to do so and confidentiality must otherwise be honored.

Contributions and Third-Parties: Reviewers who seek assistance from a colleague in the conduct of a review should acknowledge these individuals’ contributions in the written comments submitted to the editor. This should be cleared with the Section Editor responsible for the review assignment or Managing Editor prior to disclosure of any or all of a manuscript’s details to an external party. In addition, these individuals must also maintain the confidentiality of the manuscript as outlined above.

Timeliness and Quality of Feedback: Reviewers are expected to respond promptly to requests to review and to submit reviews within the time agreed. Reviewers’ comments should be constructive, honest, and polite.

Conflicts of Interest: Reviewers must declare their relationships and activities that might bias their evaluation of a manuscript and recuse themselves from the peer-review process if a conflict exists. Reviewers must not use knowledge of the work they’re reviewing before its publication to further their own interests.

Internal Distribution of Comments: Blinded reviewers’ comments may be shared with co-reviewers of the same paper, so reviewers can learn from each other in the review process. Reviewers may opt-out of this by sharing this with their assigned Section Editor.

Deposits and Digital Preservation

TSMJ uses South West Open Research Deposit (SWORD), which is a standardized mechanism for depositing our journal into repositories. The PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) is used to digitally preserve the contents of the journal. This includes Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) program, which offers decentralized and distributed preservation, access, and preservation of TSMJ content.

Open Access and Copyright Policy

The TSMJ is committed to furthering Open Access research and publishing. The full text of all content is available for free and without delay. There is no charge authors any submission fees, publication fees, editorial or article processing charges (APCs), and page or colour charges at any stage of the submission or publication process. In addition, registration is not required to read content, although users are encouraged to register to recieve notifications about newly published articles. There is no embargo period, authors are allowed to deposit all versions of their work (accepted and/or published versions) in an institutional or any other repository, including but not limited to Sherpa/Romeo, Dulcinea, Heloise, and Diadorium. 

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

Provided they are the owners of the copyright to their work, authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository, in a journal or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.