For Authors

General Peer-Review and Editorial Procedure

All manuscripts sent for publication in our journals are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed by experts (this includes research and review articles, spontaneous submissions, and invited papers). The Managing Editor of the journal will perform an initial check of the manuscript’s suitability upon receipt. The Editorial Office will then organize the peer-review process performed by independent experts and collect at least two review reports per manuscript. We ask our authors for adequate revisions (with a second round of peer-review if necessary) before a final decision is made. The final decision is made by the academic editor (usually the Editor-in-Chief of a journal or the Guest Editor of a Special Issue). Accepted articles are copy-edited and English-edited.

Editorial Decision and Revision

All the articles, reviews and communications published in MDPI journals go through the peer-review process and receive at least two review reports. The in-house editor will discuss each step of the process with the external academic editor and communicate decisions to the authors regarding the following:

• Accept in Present Form:

  The paper is accepted without any further changes.

• Accept after Minor Revisions:

  The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given five days for minor revisions.

• Reconsider after Major Revisions:

  The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point by point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. Usually, only one round of major revisions is allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within ten days and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.

• Reject and Encourage Resubmission:

  An article where additional experiments are needed to support the conclusions will be rejected and the authors will be encouraged to re-submit the paper once further experiments have been conducted.

• Reject:

  The article has serious flaws, makes no original contribution, and the paper is rejected with no offer of resubmission to the journal.