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Peer Review Policy

INDUSTRICS

Peer Review Policy

INDUSTRICS reviews work that is meant to survive contact with a plant, a production line or a field installation. Peer review here therefore asks two questions in sequence: is the engineering sound, and is the evidence strong enough to justify the claim outside the conditions in which it was gathered. This policy states how that assessment is organised and what authors and reviewers may expect from each other.

Review model: single-anonymised

INDUSTRICS operates single-anonymised review. Reviewers see the identities and affiliations of the authors; the identities of reviewers are confidential and remain so after publication, indefinitely, unless a reviewer asks in writing to be named.

Concealing authorship would achieve little in this field and would cost a great deal. It would achieve little because applied industrial work identifies itself: a process description, a plant layout, an instrumented line or a named production route narrows the authorship to a handful of groups, and often to one. It would cost a great deal because knowing who did the work is part of judging it — whether the authors had genuine access to the installation they describe, whether the data could have been collected as claimed, whether the equipment under study is their own product, and whether the manuscript quietly repeats a result the same group has already published elsewhere. A reviewer who cannot see the affiliation cannot check any of that.

Reviewer anonymity is the side that is protected, and firmly. Reports in this field are frequently written about the products, processes and suppliers of organisations that employ engineers, compete with them, or fund them. A reviewer who can be identified by a manufacturer whose technology they judged is a reviewer who will write a softer report next time, or decline outright.

The journal is explicit about the model's known weakness: a visible corporate or institutional name can lend a result credibility it has not earned, and can equally prejudice a reader against an unknown supplier or a regional laboratory. INDUSTRICS counters this structurally rather than by assurance. Every report is written against the same published criteria on a structured form; reviewers are drawn from different organisations from one another and from the authors; the handling editor weighs the evidence in the reports rather than their tone or their authors' standing; and reviewer pools are built deliberately across industry, academia, regions and career stages.

Who reviews

• Every research article is assessed by at least two independent reviewers from different organisations, selected for demonstrated expertise in the manuscript's methods or subject and verified against publication or professional record. A third reviewer is invited where the first reports conflict on substance.
• Where a manuscript rests on claims about behaviour in service — duty cycles, maintenance intervals, operator variability, ambient conditions, downtime cost — the handling editor will seek a reviewer with direct operational or plant experience, since a report written from that vantage point answers questions an academic report often cannot.
• Author-suggested reviewers may be used but never as the sole assessors; a reasoned request to exclude a reviewer, including a competitor, is honoured.

What reviewers are asked to check

A manuscript is not rejected for reporting laboratory-scale or simulation work. It is rejected for describing laboratory-scale work in the language of a deployed solution.

Proprietary data and industrial confidentiality

Much of the evidence in this field belongs to someone other than the authors. The journal accommodates that, within a limit it will not move: a claim that no reviewer is permitted to examine cannot be published as a finding.

• Authors may withhold commercially sensitive detail — process parameters, tool geometries, supplier identities, absolute production figures — provided what remains allows the result to be assessed. Normalised, indexed or scaled data are acceptable where the transformation is stated.
• Data that cannot be published but can be shown may be supplied to reviewers under confidentiality through the editorial office. Reviewers accept that material on the same terms as the manuscript: it may not be retained, shared or used.
• Reviewers are never asked to sign an agreement with a company as a condition of reviewing, and the journal will not accept a manuscript whose assessment depends on their doing so.
• Where permission to publish is required from an employer or partner, it must be in place at submission. The journal does not begin review of work that may later be withdrawn for reasons unrelated to its quality.

Competing interests

Because reviewers see who the authors are and where they work, the conflict rules do real work here and are applied strictly. The standard exclusions apply: co-authorship or shared funding within three years, the same institution, supervisory or close personal relationships. Two further exclusions are specific to this journal, and reviewers must decline where either is true:

1. They are employed by, consult for, or hold a financial interest in a company that makes or sells a technology the manuscript evaluates, favourably or unfavourably.
2. They are professionally involved in a competing product or process at a stage where publication of the manuscript would affect its position.

Authors carry the corresponding obligation. Where a study evaluates equipment, software or materials supplied, funded or manufactured by an author's employer or sponsor, that relationship is declared at submission, shown to reviewers with the manuscript, and published with the article. Such work is welcome — much of the best applied research is done by the people who build the technology — but it is assessed in the knowledge of who paid for it.

Process and decisions

1. The editorial office screens for completeness, similarity and the required declarations, normally within five days.
2. A handling editor either sends the manuscript for review or declines it without review; a decline at this stage reflects scope and priority and says so, rather than implying a verdict on quality.
3. Reviewers are invited and asked for 21 days.
4. The handling editor decides on the substance of the reports, not by counting them. Decisions are accept, minor revision, major revision, or reject; all reports accompany the decision letter, edited only to remove identifying or inappropriate remarks.
5. Major revisions return to the original reviewers wherever they are available.

Authors may appeal once, in writing, on evidence of factual error or procedural failure. Appeals are assessed by an editor who took no part in the original decision, and that decision is final.

Reviewer conduct and confidentiality

• A manuscript under review is confidential and commercially sensitive. It may not be shared, used, cited, or uploaded in whole or in part into external or generative AI services; doing so is a disclosure and a breach of this policy.
• Criticism must be evidenced and located: the passage, the figure, the number. A report that asserts a result is implausible without saying why is returned to its author.
• Review may not be delegated without the editor's prior consent, and any assistance received must be disclosed.
• The journal does not disclose reviewer identities to authors, to their employers, or to third parties, and defends that confidentiality in disputes. Reviewers may record their contribution in aggregate through ORCID in a form that does not link them to specific manuscripts.