Transparent peer review

Environmental Data Science has adopted a transparent model for peer review in which the review reports are published alongside the accepted article. The reviewer has the option of being named alongside the published review, or remaining anonymous. This model for peer review applies only to those articles submitted on or after 25 January 2024. Articles submitted before this date are not accompanied by published review reports or reviewer identities. 

During peer review, the process is single anonymized: reviewer identity is not made visible to author, author identity is visible to reviewer, reviewer and author identity is visible to the editor handling the paper and the Editor-in-Chief sending the final decision. The reviewer interacts with the editor and comments are sent to the authors in the decision letter. In the review form, the reviewer consents to the publication of the review under a CC-BY license and also confirms whether or not the review should be published with full attribution (i.e. reviewer named alongside the report) or anonymously. 

If the article is accepted, the full content of the review reports are published alongside the article, along with the reviewer identity (if the reviewer opts into being named) and the reviewer statement of competing interests. The editor identities are also published alongside the article. 

The Instructions for Reviewers can be found here.

Conference partnerships

Environmental Data Science works closely with conferences and workshops relevant to its scope. On this page we outline two basic models for partnering: 

1. Conference to Journal Integrated Model: for conferences running a peer review process deemed by the EDS Editorial Board to be at least as thorough as the journal. In this model, the conference provides EDS with full paper details and access to all of the reviews. Authors are invited to submit to EDS. Articles are accepted on the basis of the reviews performed by the conference, following an administrative and ethics check and a check of the reviews. (Note that if articles are substantially revised from the Conference, EDS reserves the right to re-review). 
2. Special Collection (Issue) Model: These are situations in which a conference or workshop does not run an intensive peer review process, and partners with EDS on the basis that the journal will run peer review through the EDS ScholarOne system.

Climate Informatics

Environmental Data Science is proud to partner with the Climate Informatics Conference on the basis of the integrated model described above. The EDS Editorial team have determined that the Climate Informatics review process for full papers is at least as rigorous as the journal's and so extends an invitation to authors of full papers to publish in EDS.

Process:

• Submission and peer review is typically run through the Conference's existing platform
• Climate Informatics provides EDS with details of full papers and provides access to reviews. 
• EDS provides authors with the option to submit to the journal and instructions to upload. 
• After submission, the journal performs administrative and publishing ethics check. The Conference provides the journal with access to the version of the articles accepted into the conference and the reviews (which are also uploaded into the journal's system to preserve an audit trail). Note that if articles are substantially revised from the Conference or if the reviews are not deemed to be sufficient by the Editor-in-Chief, EDS reserves the right to re-review. 
• The EDS Editor-in-Chief makes a final decision on whether to accept each article into EDS.
• A Provenance statement is published in each article that notes the article derives from the Conference and was accepted on the basis of the Conference's review process. 
• Articles are published on an open-access basis on a special collection page dedicated to the Conference.

EDS also encourages the authors of abstracts accepted into Climate Informatics to develop full papers to submit to the journal and these undergo the journal's standard peer review process.