Review Process
After receiving all submissions for a given review cycle, the senior staff of Clocks and Clouds will host a training session for reviewers and assistant managing editors to prepare our staff for the review process.
Then, all submissions will have personally identifying information removed and will be sent to between three and five anonymous student reviewers. These reviewers will read the work and provide detailed feedback in two forms. First, reviewers make in-line suggestions on the paper. They then answer a series of questions directly relating to each category on our evaluation rubric. We aim to provide authors with as much detailed feedback as possible to aid the process of improving work. Once all feedback is complete, our assistant managing editors will synthesize the comments and we will send the feedback to the author.
Authors will then have a period of time, no less than two weeks, to review the feedback and make changes to the paper. After finishing their revisions by the given deadline, authors resubmit their work for a second round of feedback. The second review process works the same as before.
Finally, once our reviewers have completed the resubmit review process, senior staff will meet to discuss each article and choose whether to accept or reject it. The decision process is thorough and we aim to be as objective as possible.
Regardless of whether an article is accepted, we will send the second round of feedback to the author. Please note that each review cycle is competitive and we are forced to reject many strong articles each year. We hope that even if we’re not able to publish an author’s work, they learn ways to improve their paper and future research endeavors.
Accepted Articles
After the senior staff has made final decisions for a review cycle, these decisions will be communicated with authors. In many cases, we will ask authors of accepted articles to make small changes. These can range from fixing typos and citation formatting to minor but substantive revisions. In some cases, we may accept a paper conditional on these revisions. In the event this happens, we will make this clear to authors.
We will also ask authors to sign a publication agreement allowing us to publish their work. All published authors agree not to submit their work for publication in any other journals. Presenting work at conferences is acceptable, though.