How It Works

The ARES system is a user-friendly manuscript and peer review platform dedicated to optimizing the submission and review process for authors, editors, and reviewers and to providing a safe and efficient manuscript processing system for publishers. It consists of the ARES manuscript (ARES MS) system and the ARES review (ARES RE) system.

● ARES MS System: This platform enables authors, editors, and journal managers jointly to manage manuscripts and conduct reviews. They can track the real-time status of manuscripts and communicate without any barriers. And for editors, a list of matched reviewers will be recommended for each manuscript. Editors will be able to precisely differentiate conditions and check each reviewer's homepage to find the right candidates. They can also monitor every step of the review process and have instant communication with reviewers. These features will facilitate to improve the review efficiency and receive quality review reports.

● ARES RE System: It is a peer review platform developed for reviewers to provide a scientific and convenient manuscript review system and make the review more personalized and efficient. It brings together a group of ardent academic researchers in different fields worldwide to make contributions to peer review and the development of academic publishing. For reviewers, the ARES RE system enables them to set review status (available for review or not) and review preferences (interested fields), define review timelines, manage reviewed articles, maintain instant messaging with editors, check final decisions of reviewed articles, and obtain access to the final review report (including other reviewers' comments, review quality evaluation, and review efficiency report). To thank the reviewers for their outstanding contributions to peer review, reviewers will benefit from the reward policy "points rewards" for the work they have completed.

The ARES RE system is initially integrated with the ARES MS system. The integration with other systems will be available soon.

Our Advantages

All-in-One Review Process

The ARES RE system enables reviewers to manage all review activities across journals, communicate with editors, maintain review records, and generate personal review files. Reviewers can promote themselves with the completed homepages and receive/redeem points for various activities.

Searching Reviewers: System Recommendation and Editor's Invitation

System recommendation of reviewers and the editor's invitation to reviewers ensure that the reviewers match manuscripts. The system's automatic recommendation of reviewers is based on the match of manuscript keywords and reviewers' research keywords. Editors specify conditions such as publication record, H index, and affiliation to exclude reviewers from the same affiliation, with fewer publications or lower H index, providing more accurate recommendations. In the recommendation list, editors can check each reviewer's profile to learn more about the reviewer's publications, projects, review history, average review speed, and review quality, and send review invitations to suitable reviewers selected from the list.

Self-Defined Review Schedule

Reviewers can manage their availability and select a timeline for their review reports based on their schedules. They may also temporarily close the review status, indicating unavailability, so editors will not send review invitations during that period.

Points Reward Mechanism

Reviewers will earn points based on their review work, and they can redeem the points for cash. Reviewers will also earn points by performing other tasks, such as inviting peers or recommending reviewers to editors.

Quality Control

Register Verification

ARES system will only accept successfully registered and information verified users as qualified reviewers. Qualified reviewers should be scholars who have published peer-reviewed scientific articles in established international journals as the first or corresponding author.

Scoring Mechanism

The scoring mechanism of review quality means the manuscript's decision-making editor will score a reviewer's comments. It encourages well-performed reviewers and eliminates irresponsible reviewers.

Disciplinary Measures

The ARES system encourages editors to report review misconduct. Once misconduct is confirmed, the reviewer will be punished by clearing points, disqualification from review, or removal from the ARES system according to the severity of the case. For severe cases where reviewers have generated extremely poor outcomes, the ARES system reserves the right to disclose the situation to the academic community. The purpose of disciplinary measures is to ensure that the ARES system provides reliable services for editors and maintains scientific and intellectual rigor.

Process

Registration

Individuals fill in personal information, research areas, publications, research projects, and editorial board memberships. They define review status and review schedule to complete registration. Once registered, the system verifies the registered information and approves or disapproves the registered user as a reviewer. ARES system will only accept successfully registered and information verified users as qualified reviewers. Qualified reviewers should be scholars who have published peer-reviewed scientific articles in established international journals as the first or corresponding author.

Review Invitation

Editors will receive recommended reviewers from the system based on the manuscript keywords. They may also specify conditions such as the number of publications and range of H index to search for junior or senior reviewers for different manuscripts or exclude reviewers from the author's affiliation or country to avoid potential conflicts of interest. In the recommendation list, editors can view reviewers' homepage information, including review quality rating, speed rating, research field, publications, review schedules, and review status, add the selected candidates as reviewers, and send review invitations with a click.

Reply to Review Invitation

After receiving the invitation, the reviewer will check the manuscript abstract and necessary information, and respond to editors within the specified time whether to accept the review invitation. The general rule is to reply within 24 hours.

Complete Review

Upon accepting the review invitation, reviewers will receive a link from the system to view the full manuscript and prepare the review report (format prescribed by the journal) within a preset timeframe (2, 4, 7 or 10 days). After reviewers successfully submit the review report in the system, editors will then check the review report and rate the review accordingly.

Final Report

Upon the final decision of a manuscript, the reviewer will receive a final report from the system, including other reviewers' comments (anonymous), the editor's final decision of the manuscript, as well as a review score (based on editor-rated quality and system-calculated efficiency). This will help reviewers to improve their work through peer comments and allow editors to select reviewers by referring to reviewers' review quality and efficiency. In return, reviewers are encouraged to improve their review quality and efficiency to improve their scores.

Reviewer's Responsibilities

Peer review is the basis to guarantee the scientific integrity of academic research, a pivotal approach to evaluating the validity, quality, and originality of manuscripts, and a critical tool to eliminate meaningless or poor-quality manuscripts. The review process helps to improve the manuscripts worth publishing and facilitate the development of scientific research. We hope the ARES platform will relieve review work pressure for reviewers and editors by optimizing the review process. The system is expected to enhance reviewers' participation and experience in peer review, allowing reviewers to enjoy the review work and engage more actively with improved review speed and quality. 

We now describe the ARES system's requirements for reviewers. We hope you will read the COPE guidelines for reviewers and each journal's review requirements carefully to understand the specifications you should follow to complete a high-quality review.

Conflicts of Interest

Reviewers are required to specify their potential conflicts of interest with the author or the sponsor when responding to review invitations, including but not limited to financial conflicts of interest such as employment, consultancy, equity or options, remuneration, patents, and non-gratuitous expert testimony, as well as non-financial conflicts of interest such as personal relations, competition or cooperation, nationality, gender, and religious beliefs.

Please decline the review invitation if you cannot remain objective during the review because of the conflict of interest.

Please decline the review invitation if the manuscript is similar to the manuscript you are submitting or preparing.

Please specify the situation to journal editors even if you insist that you give fair and objective comments to the manuscript despite the conflict of interest. The editor will decide whether or not you should continue the review.

Instead of eliminating all conflicts of interest in peer review, our goal is to maintain a more transparent and standard review process through exposure and assessment of conflicts of interest.

Efficiency

We believe a highly efficient review process is essential to both authors and journals. Therefore, reviewers are requested to respond to the review invitation and submit review comments within the agreed interval to avoid delayed processing of the manuscript. In cases of force majeure, reviewers should inform the editorial office of the delay so that the editors can inform the author and make alternative plans accordingly. The review efficiency will be recorded in the final report. The average review efficiency will be displayed on your homepage to select the reviewer as an indicator for editors. Ensuring efficiency means both supports to the editors and enhancement of your credibility.

Confidentiality

Reviewers are requested to keep the manuscript contents confidential, without stealing the author's ideas or conclusions for their own interests. If reviewers wish to discuss with anyone outside the review process for assistance, they must ask for the editor's permission first.

Reviewers should not disclose personal information (name, affiliation, etc.) in their review reports when the journal adopts single-blind or double-blind review mode. Review reports should be sent to the editorial office instead of the author. Although reviewers are required to keep their identities confidential to the author during the review process, the editorial office's identity could be disclosed if the reviewer wishes to reveal the information in certain circumstances. In such cases, the reviewer should contact the editorial office. The editors (not the reviewer) will disclose the information if necessary to enhance transparency in the process. 

Unbiased Review

To guarantee the validity of the review comments, reviewers should ensure that their reviews are completed without bias. Their remarks are given for manuscripts' contents, without mixing factors such as the author's gender, nationality, religious belief, political standpoint, or origin of the manuscript.

Reporting Misconduct

If reviewers encounter any suspected cases of potential ethical or publishing misconduct, such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, or ethical breaches, please promptly report to the editorial office. This would help combat academic misconduct and defend the impartiality and seriousness of academic publishing.

Prepare Review Reports

Reviewers are expected to provide objective and unbiased comments on the manuscript contents and to specify the manuscript's flaws in details for negative comments instead of personal abuse and meaningless criticism. Please read through the full manuscript and provide improvement suggestions to the author even if you do not believe the manuscript is worth publishing. In so doing, authors understand the approach to improve their manuscripts and obtain a better chance of publishing their manuscripts in the future.

Please read the journal's aims and scope and review requirements before writing a report to clarify the article preferences of different journals, this will help you make reasonable recommendations for the editor.

Format

Please check the specific format requirements of review reports in journal websites before preparing review reports, and prepare your reports accordingly. The report should be written in formal and easy-to-understand language, avoiding rarely-used words. It should be easy for non-native English speakers to understand. When making specific comments, please number the comments in sequence and refer to the corresponding pages and lines when describing particular comments, doing so will help the author to revise accordingly.

Contents

Reviewers should provide impartial and unbiased reviews of the merits and flaws of the manuscript, point out improvement suggestions to the author when raising questions, and indicate additional analyses to improve the manuscripts. These suggestions must be based on reasonable academic or technical reasons. They should not be extended beyond the existing scope of the manuscript. We encourage reviewers to cite essential articles to clarify ideas in the manuscript and expand the discussion process for readers. Yet, we oppose citing articles that are irrelevant to the manuscript contents, or for the sole purpose of increasing reviewers' or their colleagues' citations.

Reviewers should not try to change the author's language style into their own if the language is clear and does not affect a statement's accuracy. Nevertheless, not every manuscript is written in understandable language. Please do not try to fix the language or format problems in case of such issues in the manuscript. These concerns should be raised in the report, and the author should fix the language problem. The formatting problems will be fixed in the copyediting stage.

In case of suspicion of misconduct in the manuscript, including plagiarism, self-plagiarism, falsification of data, falsification of a figure, duplicate publication, or experimental ethical issues, please elaborate the case in comments the editor, including similar articles and reference information you noticed. Editors will verify the misconduct after receiving your comments and report you the verification and punishment measures. Identifying misconduct in time before publication will help avoid waste of resources and defend the scientific integrity and seriousness of academic research. Reviewers are expected to cooperate with editors to prevent misconduct.

Points Reward Rules

Newly-registered and verified reviewers to the platform will receive a 20-point registration reward. Reviewers will then receive points reward for activities such as reviewing manuscripts, inviting peers to join the ARES system, and recommending reviewers to editors. Points reward rules are as follows:

Registration Rewards

Successfully registered and verified reviewers will receive a 20-point reward. Reviewers who accept the editor's invitation will receive registration rewards directly after completing the information. If the invited reviewers directly review the manuscript without completing the report, the review will be awarded after the review is completed.

Review Rewards

Reviewers will receive 0–10 point rewards for each manuscript reviewed based on the scores of review quality and efficiency. The scoring rules are as follows:

Reward for Recommending Reviewers

When reviewers decline review invitations, they are encouraged to suggest alternative reviewers to the editor. If a recommended reviewer is accepted by the editor, the nominating reviewer will receive 1 point as a reward.

Reward for Inviting Peers

Reviewers are always encouraged to invite their peers to join ARES. They will receive 5 points once the invited peer registers successfully and is verified as a reviewer.

Redeem Points Rules

Reviewers are eligible to redeem the points for cash when they achieve 50 points. To redeem, simply specify the number of points you wish to redeem and select a payment account (first-time users will need to create one during the process). We currently recommend using a bank account, as it helps us process payments more smoothly. After submitting, our team will contact you to confirm your account details and arrange the payment. One point for 1US dollar. Redeemed points will be deducted from the reviewer's account balance once the redemption is successfully processed.

Annual Rewards

The platform's annual rewards include the maximum number of reviews reward, the fastest reviewer reward, and the best review quality reward. The winners will receive a certificate accordingly.

Disciplinary Measures

Disciplinary measures refer to the following table. These scenarios will be verified before punishment.