Organic Communications

Peer Review Polciy

The main rules and opinions of the ACG PUBLICATIONS peer review process are summarized below:

1. An extremely rigorous, comprehensive, sensitive and transparent evaluation process without compromising ethical principles,
2. At least two, preferably three or four  independent referee reports are provided, the evaluation process continues with additional opinions/new referees from the editorial board members as a result of the referee reports failing to reach a consensus,
3. The requirement of strong field interest is sought in the arbitrator selection criteria of the reviewer and measures have been taken to ensure that arbitrators with conflicts of interest are not selected.
4. The editors should not take part in the decision-making processes of the articles submitted by the members of the editorial board.
5. Completion of the average peer review decision process between 45-60 days from submission to final decision,
6. Rapid feedback process to conserve time of authors for non-scope or journal-able work (less then 5 days)
7. Presence of a strong language control system,
8. Implementation of Plagiarism control system

Other principles regarding the application of these criteria are described in detail below.

GENERAL and DEFINITIONS

ACG PUBLICATIONS accepts or rejects the articles according to the evaluation criteria of the article types described here and stated on the instruction for authors page of the journal. Manuscripts that meet these criteria are accepted, articles that do not meet the criteria are rejected. We do not evaluate the potential effects of the articles that reach us or whether the sender is a well-known distinguished scientist. Instead, we evaluate the value and validity of submitted work through rigorous quality checks and place the responsibility for making content decisions to the editorial board, which works in concert with each journal's editor-in-Chief.

In the process, responsible editors and reviewers may propose rejection at any time; while editors can make admissions decisions; It is ensured that the opinion of the editor-in-chief is taken in acceptance and rejection decisions. ACG PUBLICATIONS' Editorial Coordination team performs pre- and post-review quality reviews and final decisions are made based on the acceptance criteria given below.
While doing this process, we work in coordination with the following stakeholders.

Editorial Coordinators: The first professional team to review manuscripts for format and ethical requirements after studies reach the Editorial Office.

Authors: Scientists who submit manuscripts to journals and are essentially the owners of the journals. In this respect, authors send and should send articles with significant scientific value and included in the scope of the journal to the relevant journal. They must comply with all editorial and ethical policies and consider all referee and editorial comments.

Reviewers: Field experts who have been selected to evaluate the manuscripts. These experts examine whether the scientific data and the claims are consistent, taking into account the quality and suitability of the articles and the innovations they contain. They comment on the work to assist the editor in decision making.

Editors: Persons who are experts in their fields and serve as members of the editorial Board of the journal. These people take part in the editorial processes of the articles in their field at the suggestion of the editor-in-Chief, and manage the decision process in coordination with the Editor-in-Chief.

Editor-in-Chief: It is the person who monitors whether the entire operation of the journal and peer review process is effective, efficient and in accordance with the purpose and scope of the journal, and provides coordination with the members of the editorial board.
Any editor should contact the editor-in-Chief if he encounters any difficulties or hesitations during the evaluation process.

PEER REVIEW STAGES OF ACG PUBLICATIONS JOURNALS

Our system, which has adopted the basic principle of creating a correct and level bridge between authors, referees and readers, aims to convey the evaluation process meticulously, the quality, reliability, innovation of the data and the information to the scientific community with qualified scientific data in an appropriate language. In order for the system to be transparent and fast, only PAMS (Publisher Article Management System) is used with the referees and authors. This system has been developed by ACG PUBLICATIONS IT team in line with the demands of ACG PUBLICATIONS editors.
 
Peer review is the main decision method of ACG PUBLICATIONS journals. All manuscripts that reach ACG PUBLICATIONS journals go through the following stages, regardless of submitter, language, country, race, number of past articles or any similar data;

a) Editorial Office Review

Manuscripts uploaded to PAMS are subject to format review by the Editorial Office. At this stage, it is checked whether the data requested in the PMAS system is filled in completely and whether the article is written in accordance with the journal format. The fact that the articles are written in accordance with the template format of each journal, table, figure, Scheme, reference style, title, subtitle, article type (Original Article, Short Report, Short communication, Communication, Review Article, CRM Report, Discussion Article) are checked at this stage. In addition to these, although these will be controlled in further stages too, ethics approval document letters are also sought for studies that require approval from the ethics committee. If a deficiency is detected in any of these, a "format required" letter is written to the author by the Editorial office staff.
If the authors submit the manuscript with the same errors for the third time despite receiving a format required letter twice, the manuscript cannot be processed by the editorial office and a rejection letter is sent to the author. Manuscripts of authors who complete corrections accordingly are sent to the editor-in-Chief of the relevant journal via the PAMS system.

b) Technical Evaluation Process

The Editor-in Chief has the right to reject the manuscript submitted to him by the Editorial office directly, taking into account the above-mentioned criteria, without sending it to any referee. This right also applies to other editors appointed by the editor.

Editor-in-chief/ Editor firstly assigns the referees from the referee list in the approved database after pre-examination of the article received. If there is no suitable referee in the list of referees, it will examine the WoS database and assign the best 4 people who have done the last studies in the field of the article as the referee. Information about the articles is sent to the referees automatically via PAMS.

Referees should deliver their comments preferably within 21 calendar days. Close to the end of the time or when the time expires, the PAMS system gives a warning to the editor and sends a reminder message to the referees. After the referee reports are completed (at least two reports, preferably three or four), the editor reads the reports and conveys his decision to the authors. If there are expressions that attack the personal rights of the authors in the referee reports, the editor has the right to edit these parts. Edited reports are kept by the system in both forms and checked at random times by the chairman of the Ethics Committee of ACG PUBLICATIONS to ensure that they are not abused.

The referees forward the revised articles to the editorial office via PAMS and the relevant editor continues the process until the article is accepted or rejected. In most cases, although the articles have undergone more than one revision, the date of acceptance is recorded as the date of the last revision.
For rejected articles, the rejection letter and its justification are sent to the authors unconditionally. Any report rejected by the referees without justification is not sent to the author. In order to prevent this in the PAMS system, it has become mandatory to write the text of the evaluation report to the author in order to send the report.

Prodcution Stage
After the procedures are completed, the information of the articles is forwarded to the Production Office and the Account Office (where appropriate). Both offices follow independent processes.
The articles whose proof phase is completed are made ready for publication and are published on the "Articles in Press" page of the relevant journal until the volume and issue number are determined. For authors who want to use the fast track option, the process is run only after the article acceptance phase. In any case, these processes are not started before the article is accepted.

The schematic representation of the ACG PUBLICATIONS peer review processes is given in the this link as png file.

QUALITY STANDARDS in PEER REVIEW

The team of ACG PUBLICATIONS consists of qualified people who have adopted the right, quality scientific publication. This team is responsible for the following points.

•  It is ensured that editors and arbitrators have no relationship affecting their neutrality in the arbitration process regarding authors and/or research.
• Despite the above sensitivity, the arbitrator can be canceled during the examination of the arbitral assessment team and/or if the arbitrator is not fully experts in the event of a new cooperation opportunity while the referee's assessment is continuing, or if the arbitrators are not fully experts. replaceable.
• If the editors or arbitrators request them to be quoted from their own articles or journal (challenging quotes) in an unjust and unnecessary way, they are terminated from the moment of examination and arbitration. The referees' requests for themselves are not received in the reception.
• The referees make their scoring on the evaluation criteria existing on the Pams objectively, these scores are shown to them graphically for the referees to control the referees, and the harmony between the referees and the harmony between the written reports are meticulously controlled by the editors. Reports of incompatible ones are not used to evaluate.
•  It is checked separately by the editorial Staff and the Editor of the Editorial Staff and the Editor of the Pams system where referee assessments and processes are followed correctly. The records are kept permanent and cannot be changed.
• In the light of our above -mentioned acceptance criteria, high -quality articles that comply with the criteria of the article types of each journal on its own instruction for authors page are published.
• Editors and referees are considered to have made it clear that they have accepted the following when accepting the task of evaluation of the article with ACG PUBLICATIONS journals.
• To have the necessary expertise and indigenousness to evaluate the quality, meticulousness and validity of manuscript,
  • Sending comprehensive and high quality qualified reports,
  • To obey the refereeing evaluation periods,
  • Acting with editors, authors and editorial team in communication, ethical, constructive and offensive
  • To comply with ethical publishing practices and not to request reference to their articles unless valid and valid academic reasons are put forward.
• If an editor or arbitrator does not explicitly declare his cooperation with the authors in a way that affects his ability to conduct an impartial examination, or if he writes fake identities or deceptive article assessment reports, or to prolong the process by establishing a narrow group team circle, evaluation of unrelated persons. If it is understood that it manipulates the process (the referee assessment ring), the participation of these persons will be terminated and the duties in the ongoing submission will be canceled and the process is restarted. The subject shall also be informed about ACG Publications Ethics Committee and the institutions of the situation in accordance with Cope Guideline are also informed.

• ACG PUBLICATIONS reserves more draft revision, additional expert assessment, demand or reject the right to demand and reject the rejection or rejection after a decision was made by the editor of the journal and editor -in -chief of the editor of the journal. If any deficiency is detected during the Production phase, it may ask the authors or the editorial team to provide this. Although the issues that are not provided are accepted, ACG PUBLICATIONS may decide not to be published.
• The same processes are implemented for all manuscripts that send ACG Publications through PAMS.

As a parallel, the authors should pay attention to the following in order to ensure that the articles of the authors can be in the evaluation process or to continue the process.

• In the article evaluation processes, the editors via pams v eha editorial Coordinators should be answered on time and without escaping.
• Professional and polite communication with all stakeholders in the process
• In any case, the private phones or special correspondence address of the editors should not be used, and the whole process for the objectivity and transparency of the process should be continued through Pams. Editors have never been able to contact authors from these special communication sources.
• Authors are expected to make the necessary revisions within themselves. If the authors who do not revise in time (21 days) do not require additional time through Pams, their articles are rejected due to delay.