The Online Handbook of Language Criticism in European Perspective (Handbuch Europäische Sprachkritik Online - HESO) team understands the peer review procedure as an integral process of academic research. In this sense, the introductory, individual language, and the comparative article are first checked by the editorial team and editors and subsequently assessed by means of a double-blind peer review process before publication. Moreover, introductions and translations can also be reviewed if required.

An editorial-publishing team, consisting of two editors (rotating) and the editorial team, anonymizes the contributions to be reviewed and selects the reviewers.[1] Members of the editorial-publishing team with potential conflicts of interest are excluded.

Conflicts of interest include, for example, if a member of the editorial-publishing team is the author of an article to be reviewed, is directly involved in a research project that is the subject of the article, or is in competition with it. In this case, the anonymization of the contributions and the selection of the reviewers are transferred to other members of the editorial-publishing team.

Volumes one to four of the Online Handbook of Language Criticism in European Perspective were reviewed using a double-blind peer review process in which both the authors and reviewers were anonymized. From the fifth volume onwards, the reviewers of the double-blind peer review process are selected by the editorial team from a publicly accesible reviewer pool, the Advisory Board. The authors remain anonymous and, conversely, are not informed which members of the Advisory Board were involved in the review.

This new procedure is intended to ensure greater transparency in the review process, a lack of which is often the subject of criticism of peer review procedures. Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge the outstanding work of the reviewers, who make a significant contribution to the quality assurance of scientific research.

However, we reserve the right to commission reviewers outside of the Advisory Board with an assessment, for example, if the thematic focus of an article indicates this, and to successively evaluate and expand the Advisory Board. In addition, other experts can be called in for the assessment in individual cases, if this seems necessary.

The entire review process is moderated by rotating editorial/publishing teams. The team acts as a point of contact regarding questions and problems. If it is not possible to resolve questions or conflicts at this level, other editors who were not initially involved can be consulted for clarification as the next step. As a last resort, a person from the community who is not an editor, part of the editorial team or a member of the advisory board can act as a mediator.

If the reviewers have concerns about possible conflicts of interest before or during the review, if they are unlikely to be able to carry out the review within the specified time frame, or if there are other reasons for not being able to carry out a review, the reviewers should contact the editorial-publishing team regarding these concerns and, if in doubt, refuse to do the review.

Conversely, the editorial/publishing team ensures that reviewers are not requested if there are known potential conflicts of interest, for example, because the reviewer and author have a supervisory relationship, have published together in the past two years, or work closely together in research and teaching.

The reviewers check whether a contribution can be published in its current form and which points may require further development and revision. The authors then have the opportunity to revise their manuscripts. The review itself will not be published and all documents and content of the review process will be treated confidentially by everyone involved.

At this point, we would like to refer reviewers to the following resource, Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers, provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which provides orientation for the review.

Should the articles be directly rejected during peer review, the authors are free to publish the manuscript elsewhere (after appropriate revision).

 

[1] Articles to be reviewed are already evaluated within the project before the peer review process. We reserve the right to reject articles that do not meet the project's internal requirements before the peer review process.