We put two decades of editor-in-chief experience into this journal and its review process, built to be author-friendly from submission to decision. Review is AI-assisted, and a named human editor reads and signs every decision. No accept or reject is ever issued autonomously by software. The whole process is fully disclosed: this page describes it as it actually runs.
How a submission is assessed
- Intake and integrity screening. The submission is checked for completeness (missing items are named specifically, not as a generic block), and screened for integrity issues: references are verified against the scholarly record for existence and for whether they support the claims they are cited for, and files are screened for hidden instructions aimed at the review system. Dedicated plagiarism screening (text overlap against the published literature) and figure-integrity screening (duplicated or manipulated images) will be in place.
- Desk screen. Clear-cut cases (out of scope, no reproducibility package, fabricated references) are decided early, so authors are not kept waiting for a verdict the first pass already determines.
- Full assessment. A set of specialised, narrowly scoped AI assessments runs over the manuscript in parallel. They cover methodological soundness, statistical rigour, simulation design, application and data quality, numerical consistency, software and code quality, writing, and the reference list. Each assessment is independent of the others and returns a structured, auditable verdict.
- Reviewer panel. Three reviewer personas, matched to the submission's topic and covering an application, a methodology and a software/reproducibility angle, each read the paper and write a referee-style report. These reviews come with disclosed AI statements.
- Adversarial pass. A dedicated skeptic pass challenges lenient verdicts. The documented failure mode of reviewers is leniency, and we engineer against it.
- Reproduction. Where the article type carries runnable artifacts, the analysis is re-executed from the submitted package. No article is published before this step, and the published article states the outcome as its reproducibility badge.
- A named editor decides and signs. The editor reads the assessments, the panel reports and the reproduction outcome, then confirms or overturns and signs the decision with their name. The human owns the decision.
What authors receive
- Accept, minor or major revision: the complete detailed reviews: the structured assessments and the panel reports, for free. This detail is what makes revisions succeed.
- Rejection (desk or after full review): a short, direct letter that develops one decisive issue in depth, concretely evidenced from the manuscript. Something real to act on, not a form letter. The full assessment report can additionally be purchased as optional feedback; buying it is entirely optional, never changes the decision, and is not offered where the rejection is for integrity reasons. Appeals are always free.
Revisions
Revised manuscripts return with a point-by-point response and are re-assessed against the prior round by the same editor. We allow at most two major-revision rounds, and a paper that has not converged by then is rejected.
Accountability
Every verdict is persisted in a structured, auditable record. Our AI use is disclosed at policy level and in every decision letter (see the AI-use policy). Authors can contest any decision through the appeals procedure, which is heard independently of the editor who signed.