Peer Review Process in the Journal of Horticultural Science

This Journal uses Double blind peer review, which means both sides (the reviewers and authors) identities are concealed from each other, throughout the review process. The preliminary evaluation of manuscripts is expected to be performed within less than 5 days. The average time to complete the reviewing process is between 4 to 5 months. The Journal decision-making process includes the following steps:

• Registration in the Journal’s website by the corresponding author and submitting the manuscript.
• Reviewing the article by the journal's Editorial office for technical check, at this stage the manuscript may send back to the author to reformat the paper or any other corrections (if any) to meet the minimum requirements of the Journal.
• The Editor-in chief or a member of the editorial board, screen the manuscript and decide whether or not to send it for full peer review.
• Before sending the manuscript to reviewers it goes for similarity check using the Paper Plagiarism Checker, and if the percentage of similarity is more than 20%, the article is rejected at this stage.
• If no considerable percentage of similarity is reported, three reviewers are allocated for the manuscripts, by the Editor-in chief or a member of the editorial board and a copy of the manuscript will be sent to them by the Journal editorial office.
• The reviewers are asked to make their decision on the paper acceptance by completing the evaluation form within at most two weeks. The Journal editorial board will evaluate the reviewing process as follows:

• If at least two reviewers recommend rejecting the paper, it will be send to the Editorial board, for final decision on rejecting or further reviewing by a third reviewer.
• If at least two reviewer requests a major/minor correction, then the paper is sent back to the author to provide corrections along with appropriate responses to the reviewer’s comments.
• If a reviewer deny reviewing the paper or does not response about the paper within the predefined period of time, then another person will be assigned by the Editor-in Chief.
• If the Editor-in Chief cannot find someone as a reviewer for an article within a certain period of time, or the chosen reviewers avoid accepting the review, the article may be removed from the reviewing process at the discretion of the editor.

• As soon as the revised version of the manuscript along with the responses to the reviewers’ comments are submitted to the journal (normally within two weeks), they will be checked by the Editor and then are sent to one of the reviewers for final consideration.
• Based on the fulfilled peer reviewing process and Journal Editorial board's Comments, the final decision is made by the Editor-in Chief.

• If a manuscript is rejected, the corresponding author will be formally informed by the Journal’s Editorial office.
• A formal letter of acceptance is issued by the Journal’s Editorial office for the accepted papers.
• The papers are published in the journal based on “first come first served” policy.