In a publish-or-perish system of scientific communication, large numbers of articles are written and submitted to journals. Editors face the challenge of finding peer reviewers for all these articles. Scientists who accept invitations to review, usually for free, play a vital role in the system. This gives them a lot of freedom to choose which invitations to accept, and to perform peer review as they wish.
This blog post states my own current “code of conduct” as a peer reviewer: my answers to questions that arise whenever a researcher receives an invitation to review, or has an article to referee.
Should I review this article?
1. Only review for journals I would publish in. This means the publisher should not be Elsevier, the journal should be open access, should not have obnoxious formatting constraints, should not cost too much to the community, and should publish reviewer reports.
2. See the article’s full text before deciding. And the article should already be available on arXiv as a preprint.
