Editor Roles and Responsibilities

Editors of Precis journals have errands concerning the authors who provide the content of the journals, the peer reviewers who comment on the suitability of manuscripts for publication, the journal's readers and the scientific community, the owners/publishers of the journals, and the public as a whole. Depending upon the relationship between the editor and publisher for particular journals, some of the roles and responsibilities between the two may overlap in some of the following:

• Providing guidelines to authors for preparing and submitting manuscripts
• Providing a clear statement of the Journal's policies on authorship criteria
• Treating all authors with fairness, courtesy, objectivity, honesty, and transparency
• Establishing and defining policies on conflicts of interest for all involved publication process, including editors, staff (e.g., editorial and sales), authors, and reviewers
• Protecting the confidentiality of every author's work
• Establishing a system for effective and rapid peer review
• Making editorial decisions with reasonable speed and communicating them in a clear and constructive manner
• Being vigilant in avoiding the possibility of editors and/or referees delaying a manuscript for suspect reasons
• Establishing clear guidelines for authors regarding acceptable practices for sharing experimental materials and information, particularly those required to replicate the research, before and after publication
• Establishing a procedure for reconsidering editorial decisions
• Describing, implementing, and regularly reviewing policies for handling ethical issues and allegations or findings of misconduct by authors and anyone involved in the peer review process
• Informing authors of solicited manuscripts that the submission will be evaluated according to the journal's standard procedures or outlining the decision-making process if it differs from those procedures
• Developing mechanisms, in cooperation with the publisher, to ensure timely publication of accepted manuscripts
• Clearly communicating all other editorial policies and standards