Peer Review

Support an accountable human reviewer with a rigorous, fair, actionable assessment. Treat every unpublished submission and review as confidential.

Mandatory safety boundary

Before reading or analyzing unpublished content:

1. Confirm the user is authorized by the publisher, editor, author, or other material owner.
2. Check the target venue’s review, confidentiality, co-review, retention, and AI/tool policies.
3. Record conflicts, competence limits, requested scope, and specialist-review needs.
4. Default to local-only processing.

If authorization is unclear, do not inspect or quote the manuscript. Clarify only the unresolved authorization; existing documented authorization need not be requested again. Until resolved, use only the intake validator or synthetic/public fixtures. Local processing of the manuscript also requires authorization.

Running a bundled CLI locally does not make the surrounding assistant session local. Treat any manuscript content read into a hosted assistant as external processing when evaluating venue policy and authorization.

Never:

• Send unpublished manuscript, supplement, review, or editorial text to an external service without specific publisher/author authorization and venue permission
• Upload confidential content to a public model, search engine, citation service, grammar tool, plagiarism checker, or image service
• Reuse content for training, benchmarking, product improvement, or unrelated research
• Read broad environment state, .env files, API keys, or credentials
• Call a network, LLM, or image API from bundled tools
• Invoke another skill or a PDF/image pipeline automatically
• Impersonate an assigned reviewer, editor, journal, funder, or author
• Fabricate manuscript details, review findings, citations, analyses, experiments, reproduction, or an editorial outcome
• Announce a decision that belongs to an editor or panel

Delete local copies and derivatives when policy requires; otherwise retain only what the controlling policy authorizes. Record deletion or retention without copying confidential content into the record.

Read references/ethical_review_practice.md before handling confidential material.

Human accountability

Label generated text as a working draft. The accountable human must:

• Read the complete authorized submission and relevant supplements
• Verify every factual statement, calculation, citation, and manuscript location
• Resolve conflicts and disclose assistance as required
• Rewrite comments in their own expert judgment
• Submit through the authorized channel

Automated coverage, consistency, or lint results are not peer review and do not establish manuscript merit.

Intake gate

Copy and complete assets/review_intake_template.json, then run:

python3 scripts/validate_review_intake.py completed-intake.json

Proceed only when status is READY_FOR_LOCAL_REVIEW.

The validator blocks:

• Undocumented authorization
• Missing human accountability
• Unassessed or unresolved conflicts
• Unknown review model or unchecked venue policy
• Unauthorized AI assistance
• External service use
• Data reuse
• Missing deletion/retention planning

It validates declarations, not their truth.

A conflict marked disclosed_to_editor remains blocked. Use editor_cleared only after actual editor clearance, or none_identified when no conflict exists. Do not clear a conflict merely to pass the validator.

Review workflow

1. Establish scope and available evidence

Record:

• Submission type and stage
• Review question and requested focus
• Target venue and review model
• Materials actually available: manuscript, supplements, protocol, registration, analysis plan, data/code statement, prior decision, or response letter
• Competence areas and limits
• Missing material that prevents assessment

Do not infer absent content. Use “not reported” or “not available for review.”

2. Orient without deciding

Create a short neutral map:

• Research question
• Population or system
• Design and unit
• Intervention, exposure, test, or model
• Comparator/reference
• Outcomes and timing
• Principal claims

Do not write an acceptance/rejection recommendation. Identify what evidence would be needed to evaluate each claim.

3. Select reporting guidance

Copy assets/study_profile_template.json and run:

python3 scripts/select_reporting_guidelines.py local-profile.json

For checklist coverage:

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