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. This page describes the process as it runs.
How a submission is assessed
- Intake and integrity screening. The submission is checked for completeness (missing items are named specifically), and screened for integrity issues: the DOIs a submission prints are resolved against the DOI registries, which catches a citation to a work that does not exist and a DOI that was printed wrongly, and files are screened for hidden instructions aimed at the review system. A reference without a DOI is not machine-checked, and whether a cited work supports the claim it is cited for is a judgement the reviewers make. Dedicated plagiarism screening (text overlap against the published literature) and figure-integrity screening (duplicated or manipulated images) will be in place.
- Clear-cut cases. Work outside the scope, or a submission without the reproducibility package its article type requires, is rejected without a revision round. It is assessed as fully as any other submission first.
- 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. Two further assessments are specific to this journal:
- Design and inference calibration: whether the sample and the design can support the conclusion drawn. It covers the sample size justified in advance, or the precision actually achieved stated where it could not be, confounding and selection, multiplicity, and whether the design licenses the causal language used.
- Registration and reporting integrity: it reads the manuscript for a prospective trial registration, for the outcome reported as primary being the one the paper presents as registered, for adherence to the reporting guideline the design calls for, and for ethics, consent and de-identification statements consistent with the study described. The registry entry itself is checked by the editors against the registry before a decision is signed.
- 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.
- 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 editor re-runs the analysis from the submitted package. Every published article carries a reproducibility badge stating what was verified for it.
- A named editor decides and signs. The editor reads the assessments, the panel reports and, where one was made, 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. You receive the complete reviews, that is the structured assessments and the panel reports, at no charge. The detail is there so a revision can act on it.
- 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
A revision returns with the revised manuscript and a response letter. A short note on what changed is enough, and it gives a reason for every required point the author did not follow. The revision is 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.
We ask the corresponding author of every paper what they made of it, and the author-feedback page carries the questionnaire, the rules we publish the answers under and the results once ten authors have answered.