skills/peer-review/references/ethical_review_practice.md
Verified on 2026-07-23 against COPE, ICMJE, and illustrative publisher policies listed in assets/source_ledger.csv.
COPE identifies peer review as one of its 10 Core Practices and states that the process should be transparently described and well managed, with policies for conflicts, appeals, and disputes. The target journal’s published process controls the individual assignment.
This skill supports an accountable human preparing a review draft or structured assessment. It must not:
The editor decides the editorial outcome. The reviewer provides evidence-bounded advice within the requested scope.
COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers and ICMJE recommendations require reviewers to consider:
Disclose actual, potential, or perceived conflicts before proceeding. They can be:
The journal decides whether a disclosed conflict permits review. If unresolved, stop. Do not accept merely to gain access to unpublished work.
Accept only if the review can be completed within the agreed time. Tell the editor promptly if scope or timing changes.
Record:
Journal practices differ. A policy from another publisher is an example, not authority for the target venue.
Use scripts/validate_review_intake.py before substantive review.
An unpublished manuscript, its supplements, review comments, and editorial correspondence are privileged confidential material.
Keep processing local. Do not send, paste, upload, transcribe, summarize, or expose unpublished manuscript or review text to:
unless the publisher or author has authorized that specific use, the target venue permits it, and applicable privacy, contract, intellectual-property, and data-governance requirements are satisfied.
Authorization to review is not automatically authorization to disclose material to a service. A tool’s promise not to train on data is not, by itself, authorization.
The bundled CLIs:
They do not make an external service safe and do not authorize its use.
Obtain journal permission before sharing with a trainee or colleague. Record the contributor and acknowledge the contribution to the editor as required. The invited reviewer remains responsible for confidentiality and the submitted report.
Do not:
After submitting or ending the review:
ICMJE recommends that reviewers not retain manuscripts for personal use and delete copies after review. Local law, publisher policy, or a documented investigation may impose a different rule; follow the controlling requirement.
ICMJE says reviewers must follow the journal’s AI policy or request permission before using AI, maintain confidentiality, disclose use, and remain responsible for output that may be incorrect, incomplete, or biased.
For any permitted assistance:
If permission is absent, the policy is unclear, or confidentiality cannot be assured, do not use AI on the material. Local deterministic checks may still be possible if policy and authorization permit local file processing.
Illustrative policies, not universal rules:
Always check the current target-venue policy.
COPE and ICMJE emphasize constructive, honest, polite, fair, and timely comments.
Critique the work, not the people. Avoid:
Use direct language without hostility:
“The analysis appears to treat three observations per participant as independent. Please define the analysis unit and account for within-participant dependence, or explain why independence is justified.”
Request a new experiment or analysis only when it is necessary and proportionate to evaluate or support a central claim. State:
Do not turn review into an opportunity to redesign the authors’ research program.
Include:
Do not include:
Use only for matters that require a separate channel:
Ordinary scientific criticism should not appear only in the editor channel. Do not write a harsher private review that contradicts the author-facing report. The bundled scaffold keeps these channels visibly separate.
Reviewers identify concerns; they do not adjudicate misconduct.
Use “Figure 3 appears similar to Figure 5 after rotation; please assess under the journal’s image-integrity process,” not “the authors fabricated the data.”