Anonymity: It is the policy of the journal that the names of referees are kept confidential, unless otherwise requested by referees in their report.

Confidentiality: When agreeing to referee an article, all referees undertake to keep the article confidential, and not to redistribute it without permission from the journal and the authors.

Conflicts of interest: Where referees have a conflict of interest (e.g. competing commercial interest or a personal association that could bias judgement) this should be declared upon invitation to referee.

Data protection: Referee details are entered on our editorial database to ensure that we can process articles efficiently as well as for general administrative purposes. We will not pass your information on to third parties other than our contractors, suppliers or agents who we use to provide services that you have requested or who help us provide those services.

Reviewing procedures

Journal procedure: All submitted manuscript are sent to an Editorial Board Member for an initial assessment of their suitability, and may be returned to authors without in-depth peer review if this assessment makes it seem unlikely that the paper will be accepted. Contributions submitted to Botanicheskii zhurnal that are selected for peer review are usually sent to two or more independent referees. Authors are welcome to suggest suitable referees in the letter to the Editor attached with the submission. The Section Editor will make an overall decision on a manuscript using peer reviewer comments.

Your review (in whole or in part) will be seen by the paper’s author(s), Section Editor, and (Deputy) Editor-in-Chief. The journal also reserves the right to send your comments, in confidence, to other experts in the case of further advice being required. If you wish to share your review with Publons you can do this.

Decision options: Reviewers are asked to recommend either acceptance, revision (minor/major) or rejection. Acceptance should be selected for a paper that is basically ready for publication but may need some minor changes. Revision indicates that a paper does not have major problems, and should be acceptable with some further work. Rejection should be reserved for papers that have major problems with experimental design, interpretation or novelty, or if you have identified misconduct or ethical issues.

The comments to authors section of your review should be as thorough and constructive as possible.

Speed of refereeing: The journal endeavors to keep time from submission to publication as short as possible. Therefore, we ask referees to report back within 14 days of receiving the manuscript. In certain instances, an extension to this time may be granted by the Section Editor, but should be agreed in advance.

Revisions and resubmissions: Please note that it is the editorial policy of Botanicheskii zhurnal to offer authors just one round of revision in which to address changes requested by referees. If the revisions are not considered satisfactory by the Section Editor, then the paper will be rejected, and not considered further for publication by the journal. In the event that the author chooses not to address a referee’s comments, and no scientific justification is included in their cover letter for this omission, it is at the discretion of the Section Editor whether to continue considering the manuscript. For some rejected manuscripts, the authors will be permitted to resubmit a revised version and enough time to perform additional experiments will be provided.

For most revised or resubmitted articles, one or more of the original referees will be asked to review it and comment on authors’ replies to their criticisms of the original version.

Adjudication: In cases of a substantial disparity between referee reports, other Editorial Board members and (Deputy) Editor-in-Chief are often invited to be adjudicators.

Appeals: Authors have the right to appeal a rejection decision. In this circumstance, referees may be asked by the Section Editor to comment on issues raised by the authors. Appeals will only be considered if there has been a fundamental and clear misunderstanding of the research presented in the manuscript and are preceded not in the first priority.

The outcome of an appeal is final and at the Section Editor’s discretion. Appeals will have one of three outcomes:
— The appeal is unsuccessful, and the rejection decision is not overturned
— The appeal is a success, and a resubmission is invited
— The appeal is a success, and the paper published ‘as is’.

In the event that the appeal is unsuccessful, the journal considers the matter closed, and will not conduct further correspondence regarding that appeal or rejected manuscript.

Reviewer recognition

Botanicheskii zhurnal encourage reviewers to report their reviews (openly or confidentially) to Publons to give reviewers formal recognition for their work. Over tens of thousands of experts already use Publons to effortlessly track, verify and showcase their peer review and editorial contributions across the world’s journals, without compromising reviewer anonymity. Publons makes it simple to include verified evidence of your peer review and editorial activity in funding and promotion. You can add reviews you have done for other journals by forwarding your review receipts (i.e. “thank you for reviewing” emails from journals) to reviews@publons.com. You can learn more about Publons at https://publons.com/home/.

Each reviewer also receives a printed copy of the journal, where the manuscript he/she reviewed is finally published or any other recent issue, if the manuscript was rejected.