The Advisory Board fulfills three main purposes. In order to most effectively contribute to WJES, the Board:
- Ensures that the journal is solely academic and professional in nature and continually meets its goals outlined in the vision
- Provides general advice and specific comments for journal executives, the peer-review process, editing, and all other parts of WJES’ existence. If the need arises, the Advisory Board will also solve academic and contributor discrepancies (e.g. peer-review/contributor issues).
- Represents, as well as possible, all constituencies of possible readers to provide diverse and insightful advisement.
Peer-review process
WJES’ unique, abridged peer-review process exists to uphold academic integrity, credibility, and validity of all content. While Managing and Executive Editors are responsible for editing grammar, style, etc., peer-reviewers edit and critically suggest advice on content, subject, findings, etc.
After review from WJES and Imprint Publications editor(s), submissions will be sent to the peer-review process. Peer-review reviewers are hereby referred to as “reviewers”; the WJES Managing Editor and Imprint Publications members involved in the peer-review process are hereby referred to as the “publisher”.
The Peer-Review Board is made of approximately 25 qualified professors actively engaging in research. As environmental studies is a broad discipline, a group of reviewers (e.g. two to five) will be contacted for each journal article in order to provide the most relevant review.
A description of each section of the peer-review process is detailed below:
- Article submission by author: The author submits his/her edited and polished article to the publisher.
- Article accessed and edited by publisher: The publisher adds minor edits to the article and, if need be, suggests room for major revisions.
- Send back to author for major revisions: The publisher sends the article back to the author for major edits and/or corrections. After author correction, the article is re-submitted and follows the peer-review process from the start.
- Rejection (both): In rare times, if the submitted article is not up to the journal’s minimum standards, or is blatantly not appropriate or aligned with journal content, then the article may be rejected. However, in most cases, the article will instead be sent back to the author for major revisions.
- Sent to reviewers: The publisher emails the edited article individually to each member of the peer-review group.
- Accessed by reviewers: The reviewers individually add their edits and suggestions. After, reviewers send their edited versions back to the publisher.
- Reviews accessed by publisher: The publisher reviews all edits, revisions, and suggestions made by the reviewers and adds any additional minor edits necessary. Mostly, this step is intended for the publisher to aggregate all individual reviewer versions into a final draft. In the event of reviewer discrepancies on an edit (e.g. two reviewers disagreeing on an edit) the publisher will, with the oversight of the reviewers, attempt to resolve the dispute. If unable to do so, the publisher will seek a third, fourth, or as many opinions as necessary to solidify the status of the edit.
- Send back to reviewers for further edits: If there are any discrepancies, as discussed above in the Reviews accessed by the publisher step, this step allows for the publisher to send such edits back to the reviewer. Or, if the publisher simply deems that the article needs more revisions, then this step applies.
This step can also include some communication with the author to ascertain the validity of a claim. This step is the most likely scenario, it is also likely that an article will remain in this cycle until satisfactory. - Accepted and moves on to publication: If the article meets all of the rules outlined in Section 5 of the journal charter and is peer-reviewed and edited, then the article moves onto the Imprint Publications team to be published in the next issue of WJES. This is an unlikely scenario following the first review.
- Send back to author for revision: If the reviewers indicate that the article is wrong, misleading, or otherwise demands major revisions or writing, the article will be sent back to the author.
Role of advisory board in the peer-review process
The role of Advisory Board members in the peer-review process is two-fold, both:
- To provide general critiques and comments in order to improve the peer-review process, and
- To solve peer-reviewer/contributor discrepancies.
Photos by Justin Hammond