Transparency in peer review

What is it about?

Review is something that can have all shades of grey, even black. The black ones are allegedly reviewed, unfortunately a practice that can be observed in the literature. I can read “peer reviewed” published papers where I wonder if anybody with a functioning brain has ever read it. In the grey area, you find things as if copied from an advertisement: “Reduce the editorial time by proactively inviting the articles reviewed via our tools and reports” or “...article reports for language, plagiarism, reference accuracy & actuality will also help you to review the articles”. This sounds as if machines were doing the review. My question is whether this software has the finesse of your trade. The next version is the editor’s review. An editor may be excellent in picking up flawed language or unprecise diction. But again, no editor may be that smart and knowledgeable in order to pick scientific errors in a very specialized area of dentistry. Therefore, we rely on peer review, which means that the editor has a list of potential reviewers that are actively working on the specialty of the manuscript that needs to be reviewed. The backside of this approach is that the more qualified and specialized such a person is, the busier he/she usually is. Consequently, it has become a real pain to find good reviewers, willing to read and evaluate a manuscript in a relatively short time. In order to improve the peer review process, we decided to do a major investment and purchase the Manuscript Manager (www.manuscriptmanager.com). I can proudly announce that the Issue Stomatology Edu Journal 2019; 6 (1) is the first issue that was produced with manuscripts that were processed with the Manuscript Manager.

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