IETR Center Publications Inc.

International Engineering and Technology Research Center.

IETR Center Press

IETR Center Press is one of the world’s largest publishers of peer-reviewed, fully Open Access journals. Built on an ethos of openness, we are passionate about working with the global academic community to promote open scholarly research to the world. With the help of our academic Editors, based in institutions around the globe, we are able to focus on serving our authors while preserving robust publishing standards and editorial integrity.

 

For Authors

General Peer-Review and Editorial Procedure
All manuscripts sent for publication in our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts (this includes research and review articles, spontaneous submissions, and invited papers). The Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. We ask our authors for adequate revisions (with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is made. The final decision is made by the academic editor (usually the Editor-in-Chief of a journal or the Guest Editor of a Special Issue). Accepted articles are copy-edited and English-edited.

Editorial Decision and Revision
All the articles, reviews and communications published in MDPI journals go through the peer-review process and receive at least two review reports. The in-house editor will discuss each step of the process with the external academic editor and communicate decisions to the authors regarding the following:

Accept in Present Form:
The paper is accepted without any further changes.

Accept after Minor Revisions:
The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.

Reconsider after Major Revisions:
The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point by point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. Usually, only one round of major revisions is allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.

Reject and Encourage Resubmission:
An article where additional experiments are needed to support the conclusions will be rejected and the authors will be encouraged to re-submit the paper once further experiments have been conducted.

Reject:
The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper is rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.

 

For Reviewers

Invitation to Review
Manuscripts submitted to IETR Center Press journals are reviewed by at least two experts. Reviewers are asked to evaluate the quality of the manuscript and to provide a recommendation to the external editor on whether a manuscript can be accepted, requires revisions or should be rejected.

We ask invited reviewers to:

Accept or decline any invitations quickly, based on the manuscript title and abstract;
Suggest alternative reviewers if an invitation must be declined;
Request an extension in case more time is required to compose a report.
As part of the assessment, reviewers will be asked:

To rate the originality, significance, quality of the presentation, scientific soundness, interest to the readers, overall merit and English level of the manuscript;
To provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript;
To provide a detailed, constructive review report;
Potential Conflicts of Interests
We ask reviewers to inform the journal editor if they hold a conflict of interests that may prejudice the review report, either in a positive or negative way. The editorial office will check as far as possible before invitation, however we appreciate the cooperation of reviewers in this matter. Reviewers who are invited to assess a manuscript they previously reviewed for another journal should not consider this as a conflict of interest in itself. In this case, reviewers should feel free to let us know if the manuscript has been improved or not compared to the previous version.

Confidentiality and Anonymity
Reviewers should keep the content of the manuscript, including the abstract, confidential. Reviewers must inform the Editorial Office if they would like a student or colleague to complete the review on their behalf.

IETR Center Press journals operate single or double blind peer review. Reviewers should be careful not to reveal their identity to the authors, either in their comments or in metadata for reports submitted in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

Some journals offer authors the possibility to publish review reports with their paper and for reviewers to sign their open review reports, however this will only be done at publication with your express permission. If this is the case, it will be noted in the message inviting you to review. In all other cases, review reports are considered confidential and will only be disclosed with the explicit permission of the reviewer.

Note that reviewers are given access to all review reports for manuscripts they review via the online submission system after the final decision has been made.

Rating the Manuscript
Please rate the following aspects of the manuscript:

Originality/Novelty: Is the question original and well defined? Do the results provide an advance in current knowledge?
Significance: Are the results interpreted appropriately? Are they significant? Are all conclusions justified and supported by the results? Are hypotheses and speculations carefully identified as such?
Quality of Presentation: Is the article written in an appropriate way? Are the data and analyses presented appropriately? Are the highest standards for presentation of the results used?
Scientific Soundness: is the study correctly designed and technically sound? Are the analyses performed with the highest technical standards? Are the data robust enough to draw the conclusions? Are the methods, tools, software, and reagents described with sufficient details to allow another researcher to reproduce the results?
Interest to the Readers: Are the conclusions interesting for the readership of the Journal? Will the paper attract a wide readership, or be of interest only to a limited number of people? (please see the Aims and Scope of the journal)
Overall Merit: Is there an overall benefit to publishing this work? Does the work provide an advance towards the current knowledge? Do the authors have addressed an important long-standing question with smart experiments?
English Level: Is the English language appropriate and understandable?
Manuscripts submitted to IETR Center Press journals should meet the highest standards of publication ethics.
Manuscripts should only report results that have not been submitted or published before, even in part.
Manuscripts must be original and should not reuse text from another source without appropriate citation.
For biological studies, the studies reported should have been carried out in accordance with generally accepted ethical research standards.
If reviewers become aware of such scientific misconduct or fraud, plagiarism or any other unethical behavior related to the manuscript, they should raise these concerns with the in-house editor immediately.

Overall Recommendation
Please provide an overall recommendation for the publication of the manuscript as follows:

Accept in present form
The manuscript makes a significant and unique contribution to current knowledge, is clearly presented, and describes the methodology with sufficient details to be verifiable.

Minor revisions
The manuscript could be acceptable for publication, but would either benefit from specific changes to improve overall quality or from corrections to minor methodological errors (that do not change the conclusions of the paper). Reviewers may request that the revised manuscripts are sent to them for another review.

Major revisions
There is some merit in the article, but it fails to meet all the requirements for publication. Reviewers should clearly and specifically mention areas for improvement and, if possible, provide references to substantiate the comments made. A revised version of the article will usually be sent to the reviewer for further comment.

Reject
The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, or the amount of work required to make it publishable could not be completed in a reasonable amount of time. Reviewers should assist the authors by suggesting how the manuscript could be altered to bring it to a publishable standard. An opportunity to revise the manuscript may be offered to the authors at the discretion of the external editor. In this case, the reviewer will usually be invited to comment on the revised version.

Note that your recommendation is visible only to journal editors, not to the authors.

Timely Review Reports
IETR Center Press aims to provide an efficient and high quality publishing service to authors and to the scientific community. We ask reviewers to assist by providing review reports in a timely manner. Please contact the editorial office if you require an extension to the review deadline.

Review Report
Review reports should contain:

A brief summary (one short paragraph) outlining the aim of the paper and its main contributions.
Broad comments highlighting areas of strength and weakness. These comments should be specific enough for authors to be able to respond.
Specific comments referring to line numbers, tables or figures. Reviewers need not comment on formatting issues that do not obscure the meaning of the paper, as these will be addressed by editors.

For Editors

Editor-in-Chief Responsibilities
The Editor-in-Chief is the head of the journal, and is mainly responsible for the scientific quality of the journal. Unlike other Publishers, IETR does not need the Editor-in-Chief to be actively involved in the editorial process, i.e. the IETR editorial team in London will take care of the majority of contact with authors and reviewers. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for assisting the Editorial Office in the management of the journal, which entails:

 Scientific decisions about the journal's scope,
 Inviting distinguished scientists to join the editorial board,
 Suggesting topics for special issues,
 Assisting the Guest Editors in the setup of special issues,
 Overviewing the editorial process for individual manuscripts (mainly by taking the final decision whether a paper can be published after peer-review and revisions).
The Editor-in-Chief position is honorary. The initial term for the Editor-in-Chief position is two years and can be renewed.

Editorial Board Member Responsibilities
An Editorial Board member will be asked to review one or two manuscripts per year. Additionally, the Editorial Board members will be approached for input or feedback regarding new regulations relating to the journal from time to time. Editorial Board members are also encouraged to help to promote the journal among their peers or at conferences. The communication with Editorial Board members is done primarily by E-mail. The initial term for an Editorial Board membership is two years and can be renewed. An Editorial Board member may also step down from the position at any time if he or she feels overloaded by the requests from the journal’s Editorial Office.

Open Access Policy

All articles published by IETR Center Press are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. This means:

everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in IETR Center Press journals, and
everyone is free to re-use the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given.
open access publication is supported by the authors' institutes or research funding agencies by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.

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