Becoming a journal reviewer

Volunteer to be a journal reviewer

Disclaimer:
All reviewers are carefully chosen by our editorial team who balance experience levels, research interests, publication history and volunteer status amongst other factors. Volunteers are flagged within our system but we cannot guarantee that you will be selected as a reviewer for one of our journals. Read our reviewer guidelines here.

There are no specific qualifications needed to be a reviewer, but most reviewers will have a PhD. You certainly need to be able to prove you know the field of study well enough to be able to assess the novelty, quality, impact and importance of the research.

If you have never been a reviewer before, we strongly recommend you take our free, state-of-the-art course on how to write an excellent review, which can be found here: https://ioptraining.streamlxp.com/register (registration required).

Click here for  Chinese language version of this page.

IOP Publishing (IOP) is committed to recognising and rewarding peer review. Here are some of the benefits you can enjoy as a reviewer: 

• When you review for an IOP journal you may claim a 10% discount towards the cost of publishing an article in any IOP Publishing-owned journal on a gold open access basis, within two years of your review. Any author on a manuscript may claim a 10% reviewer discount. Read the Terms and Conditions of our reviewer discount programme here. 
• We recognise our best reviewers via IOP Trusted Reviewer certification. You can be fast-tracked towards IOP Trusted Reviewer certification by completing our free training course here.
• We offer free, interactive online peer review workshops for our reviewers. Register your interest here.
• By reviewing for our journals you will be eligible for the IOP Publishing Reviewer Awards.
• For participating journals you can opt in to publish your reviewer reports and view other reviewer comments via Transparent Peer Review.

Benefits through Publons

Through our partnership with Publons, you can access the following benefits.

• Receive notifications when the paper you have reviewed is published (even if in a different journal)
• Automatically sync your peer review activity in Publons with your ORCID activity
• Share or request credit for any co-review activity
• Export your reviewing history as a Publons CV.

Please ensure you opt in for Publons recognition during the review process or claim your review after completion.

Please check the peer review model of a journal via the “About the Journal” section of our journal homepages.

View Journals

Double-anonymous peer review

How does it work?

Authors and reviewers are anonymous to each other.

What should I do if I want my work to be reviewed using double-anonymous peer review?

• Check the journal you are submitting to supports double-anonymous peer review.
• Authors are responsible for anonymising their manuscript before submitting their paper. Click here for more information on how to do this, including a checklist(also available in Chinese).
• You can still share your research results via preprint servers such as arXiv and other early sharing platforms. This does mean that author identities may be easier to find online if reviewers try to find them. We ask our reviewers to undertake an objective review of an article and when agreeing to a double-anonymous review we trust that they will not go out of their way to undermine author anonymity, however this can never be guaranteed.
• Read our double-anonymous FAQs

Single anonymous peer review

How does it work?

Reviewers are anonymous to authors. Author identities are visible to reviewers.

What should I do if I want my work to be reviewed using single-anonymous peer review?

• Check the journal you are submitting to supports single-anonymous peer review.
• Your manuscript should contain a complete listing of all authors, including affiliations.

Transparent peer review

How does it work?

• The reviewer’s comments, author responses and editorial decision letters are published alongside the final published article, in citable form. The article may have been single or double anonymously peer reviewed before publication. We hope that this greater transparency will improve the quality of the review process, give more recognition to the work of reviewers and help with the teaching of best practice in peer review.

What should I do if I want to opt-in to transparent peer review?

• Check the journal you are submitting to supports transparent peer review (it is available on all of IOP’s fully Open Access journals).
• Both authors and reviewers can opt-out of transparent peer review should they wish to do so. The peer review history will only appear for articles where the author and (all) reviewers opt in. Reviewers who do opt-in can still choose to remain anonymous.

What does transparent peer review look like?

The peer review history is available only for articles displaying a Publons badge (above) at the top of the article (next to the title). Click on the badge to view further information. All peer review content displayed will be covered by a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license.

Some example articles published with transparent peer review content are available here:

• ERL: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab5f96; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab763f
• JNE: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/ab5e08; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/ab6cba
• JPMat: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7639/ab749c

Post publication review

While we do not have any functionality on our site for post-publication review, we welcome comments on published work. This could be via social media (many of our journals have their own Twitter accounts, for example), or via an external website such as PubPeer. Some of our journals publish comments on previously published work. Check your journal instructions for more information.

As a reviewer for IOP journals, you will be expected to complete your review within 7–28 days, depending on the journal and type of article you are reviewing. When this is not possible, we will consider requests for extensions where appropriate. You will be expected to comment on multiple aspects of the paper, most commonly scientific rigour, novelty, quality, impact and importance. More information on how to complete a review is given in the next section.

We understand you are busy and we try not to send anyone too many tasks. You can always decline any request you are sent. If you are a Board Member or on an Advisory Panel for one of our journals you may receive requests more frequently.

Research papers submitted for publication in IOP journals are most commonly sent to two independent reviewers. Reviewers are selected from our reviewer database and we try to find the best combination of scientific expertise and reviewing experience for each paper. It’s really important for reviewers to keep their research interests up to date on ScholarOne, so we only send them papers that are in the right subject areas.

Authors are welcome to suggest reviewers for their paper if they wish but this is not required, and we are not obliged to use author suggested reviewers. In the interests of impartiality, if an author-suggested reviewer is used then we will complement this with a review from a second referee chosen by the journal from the general reviwer pool.

How to update your Scholar One account

Our guidelines are applicable to the journals listed below. For guidelines specific to other partner journals, including the American Astronomical Society titles, please consult those journals’ respective homepages. Journal homepages can be accessed from here.

We manage all our submissions and peer review through a web-based system called ScholarOne. It is really easy to set up your account and keep it up to date. Watch this video to find out how.

ScholarOne now supports login and account creation via your ORCID iD. See our help guide for further details.

How to create an account on ScholarOne

If you are planning on being unavailable for a period of time, please enter the dates into the ‘Unavailable Dates’ section OF the ‘User ID / Password & Other Information’ area of your ScholarOne account. This will help ensure we do not send you requests to review an article while you are unavailable.