Assessing reviews and ensuring privacy

Assessing reviews

Once the last of your reviews has been completed, it’s time for you to compile them and respond to the author with the decision.

Log into your Associate/Guest Editor tasks page and click on the submission ID# to open its page. Scroll down to the now green Assigned reviewers section. Each reviewer will have sent his/her answers to the review questions. Each reviewer also has the option of sending you an “alias” copy of the manuscript itself with his or her comments embedded via Track Changes—if your reviewer wrote any. Each reviewer also has the option of sending a separate (anonymous) letter to the author with specific suggestions.
You can open up each document from the reviewers and read through them. If you plan on writing a summary letter to the author of your own, this is your opportunity to extract specific sentences, concerns or corrections that reviewers want made, depending on the overall decision of your reviewers.

Ensuring privacy

One important task to do is check that any attachments that a reviewer has made to the system—typically their comments on the manuscript—is anonymous. You would be surprised at how many reviewers do not do this! Unfortunately the online system cannot do this processing automatically. While the CSIT editors regularly scroll through all new reviews to check that they are anonymous, AEs should know how to recognize when a review is not and fix—that is, process—it.

These unscrubbed files are known as "unprocessed". They appear in the online system as [upload processed file]. To ensure they are private, follow the directions here, then upload the anonymized ("processed") file to the system.