1. General Policy

Intelligent Electronics & Metrology (IEM) establishes a standardized, fair, and transparent peer review system in strict accordance with the Code of Conduct and best practice guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the transparent publishing principles for open-access journals. As the top-level official public policy of the journal, this document is openly available to all authors, reviewers, academic institutions, and the public. It defines the peer review model, standardized procedures, ethical principles, responsibility boundaries, and appeal mechanisms of IEM, aiming to safeguard academic impartiality, ensure publication quality, and maintain the journal’s academic credibility.

This policy applies to the peer review of all manuscripts submitted to IEM, covering all manuscript types including regular research articles and review articles. It serves as the core implementation basis for editorial evaluation, peer review adjudication, and academic misconduct handling.

2. Peer Review Model

IEM fully adopts the Double-Blind Peer Review model, the standard peer review mechanism widely recognized by international open-access scientific journals:

1. Reviewers are not provided with any personal information of authors, including names, institutional affiliations, funding projects, and academic profiles, so as to eliminate interpersonal bias and subjective academic prejudice.

2. Authors have no access to the identities of reviewers, which fully protects reviewers’ independent academic judgment and ensures objective and impartial evaluation.

3. The editorial office strictly masks all traceable author information in submitted manuscripts to guarantee the completeness and effectiveness of double-blind review.

All manuscripts accepted for formal publication in IEM must undergo rigorous double-blind peer review, with no exceptions for any manuscript type.

3. Scope of Peer Review

All original research articles and review articles within the journal’s scope are mandatory for peer evaluation. The review comprehensively assesses seven core dimensions of each manuscript: academic innovation, scientific rationality, experimental reliability, logical completeness, formatting standardization, journal suitability, and academic compliance, avoiding superficial and formalistic evaluation.

Supplementary materials, experimental datasets, appendices, figures, and tables are reviewed together with the main text to ensure the authenticity, completeness, and compliance of all research outputs.

4. Standard Peer Review Workflow

IEM implements a standardized closed-loop peer review system with transparent procedures and clear responsibilities:

Step 1: Initial Editorial Screening The editorial office conducts preliminary checks on manuscript format, similarity detection, and scope suitability. Manuscripts with formatting errors, academic misconduct, or off-topic content are rejected at this stage; qualified manuscripts proceed to external peer review.

Step 2: External Peer Review The editorial office assigns 2–3 independent experts in the relevant research field for blind evaluation. All reviewers complete their assessments independently without mutual communication or interference.

Step 3: Opinion Consolidation and Editorial Decision The editorial office summarizes reviewer comments and comprehensively evaluates manuscript quality, academic value, and revision feasibility to issue final decisions, including Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, and Reject.

Step 4: Revised Manuscript Re-evaluation (If Applicable) Manuscripts requiring major revision will be returned to the original reviewers for secondary evaluation after author revision. The final publication decision is determined based on the revision quality.

Step 5: Final Acceptance and Production The editorial team conducts final compliance verification. Manuscripts that meet all academic and formatting standards will enter the formal publishing process.

5. Conflict of Interest Policy

To fully guarantee impartial peer review, IEM enforces a mandatory conflict of interest recusal policy. Reviewers and editors must recuse themselves if any of the following situations apply:

1. Having close academic cooperation, institutional affiliation, supervisor-student relationship, or kinship with any author of the manuscript.

2. Having academic competition, research disputes, or academic confrontations with the authors within the past three years.

3. The manuscript content substantially overlaps with the reviewer’s ongoing or unpublished research projects, resulting in potential academic conflicts of interest.

4. Any other circumstances that may compromise the objectivity and fairness of peer review.

All review invitations are attached with a conflict of interest declaration. Reviewers must actively verify and confirm recusal or acceptance of review tasks. Concealment of conflicts will be recorded in the reviewer credit file.

6. Confidentiality Policy

IEM strictly protects pre-publication academic confidentiality and intellectual property rights and implements a permanent confidentiality mechanism:

1. All unpublished manuscript content, review records, reviewer comments, and review process information are strictly confidential and shall not be disclosed, disseminated, or reused by any third party.

2. Reviewers are prohibited from using unpublished data, methods, and innovative ideas contained in manuscripts for personal research, project application, or commercial activities before official publication.

3. The editorial office securely archives all review records and does not disclose any confidential review information without legitimate academic verification purposes.

4. Confidentiality obligations are permanently valid and shall not terminate due to manuscript acceptance, rejection, or retraction.

7. Decision-Making Responsibility Framework

1. Reviewer Responsibilities: Reviewers only provide professional academic evaluations and constructive revision suggestions. They do not have final publication decision-making authority, and all review comments serve only as references for editorial judgment.

2. Editorial Office Responsibilities: The editorial office holds the final decision-making right for all manuscripts. It oversees review progress, evaluates review quality, arbitrates conflicting review opinions, and maintains full academic independence free from external commercial or interpersonal interference.

3. Publisher Responsibilities: The publisher only provides technical publishing support and does not interfere with any academic evaluation or editorial decisions, ensuring complete academic autonomy of the journal.

8. Author Appeal Mechanism

To protect authors’ legitimate academic rights and interests, IEM provides a standardized peer review appeal channel:

1. Authors with reasonable objections to review results or reviewer comments may submit a formal written appeal with valid academic evidence via the official email within 7 working days after receiving the decision notification.

2. The editorial office, together with the editorial board, will conduct a comprehensive re-examination of the entire review process and verify the professionalism, objectivity, and fairness of the evaluation.

3. The appeal verification result will be fed back to the author within 10 working days, which represents the final adjudication of the journal.

4. Malicious or repeated appeals without valid academic justification will not be accepted by the journal.

9. Academic Misconduct Handling Rules

During the entire peer review and publication process, any verified academic misconduct including plagiarism, multiple submissions, data fabrication, data tampering, duplicate publication, and inappropriate authorship will be handled in accordance with COPE guidelines. The journal will terminate the review process and file a formal record for misconduct manuscripts. For accepted or published articles with confirmed misconduct, the journal will initiate retraction procedures, issue public retraction statements, and permanently record the misconduct in the journal’s academic integrity archive.

10. Review Quality Control Mechanism

IEM establishes a regular review quality management system to continuously optimize peer review standards and academic quality:

1. The editorial office regularly evaluates reviewers based on review quality, timeliness, and professionalism, and disqualifies reviewers with perfunctory, delayed, or non-compliant review behaviors.

2. The journal implements an outstanding reviewer incentive program and continuously expands the expert reviewer pool with high-quality and field-matched scholars.

3. The editorial office has the right to dismiss biased or unreasonable review opinions and invite new independent reviewers for re-evaluation to ensure review fairness.

11. Policy Updates and Supplementary Provisions

This Peer Review Policy is formulated in accordance with international academic publishing standards, COPE guidelines, and journal operational specifications. The Editorial Office of Intelligent Electronics & Metrology (IEM) reserves the right of final interpretation.

The journal will revise and update this policy timely in response to upgraded international publishing standards and industrial norms. All updates take effect upon official announcement on the journal website without separate notification. All subsequent manuscript submissions and peer review procedures shall comply with the latest version of this policy.