Peer Review Process

COMMUNICATIONS applies a single-anonymous peer review process, in which reviewers know the identities of the authors, while the identities of the reviewers remain confidential to the authors.

All submitted manuscripts undergo an initial editorial screening to assess their conformity with the journal’s aims and scope, official manuscript template, author guidelines, ethical standards, originality, and overall academic quality. Manuscripts that fall outside the journal’s scope, do not follow the official template, or do not meet the journal’s basic academic and ethical requirements may be rejected at this stage without external peer review.

Before being sent to reviewers, each manuscript is screened for similarity using Turnitin. The editorial team evaluates similarity reports contextually, and the similarity score is not used as the sole basis for determining plagiarism.

Manuscripts that pass the initial screening are reviewed by at least two independent reviewers with expertise relevant to the manuscript’s subject. Reviewers assess the manuscript’s originality, scholarly contribution, methodological rigor, quality of analysis, validity of findings and conclusions, ethical compliance, and relevance of references.

Based on the reviewers’ recommendations, the editor may issue one of the following decisions: accept submission, revisions required, resubmit for review, resubmit elsewhere, or decline submission. When reviewers provide substantially different recommendations, the editor may appoint an additional reviewer. Reviewers provide recommendations, while the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection rests with the Editor-in-Chief or the assigned editor.

The external peer review process normally takes approximately 14–30 working days from the date the manuscript is assigned to the reviewers. The duration may vary depending on reviewer availability, manuscript complexity, revisions required, and the number of review rounds.

The peer review and editorial processes are conducted in accordance with internationally recognized publication ethics and the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). All accepted articles are published with immediate open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).