Information for reviewers

The objectives of the Virtual Library are:
    (1) to provide an open access library to publish articles on good practices in the response to TB, HIV and Viral Hepatitis in the WHO European Region; and
    (2) to build capacity in health systems to respond to the epidemics within the WHO European Region.

The request for review will come by e-mail and will include the abstract of the article. You will be asked to log into our online virtual library management system to indicate whether you can undertake the review. Considerations should include: do you have the expertise required to do this review; can you be unbiased (i.e. no conflict of interest); and do you have the time to complete the review (estimated 2-5 hours for experienced reviewers, 8 for new reviewers). If you are unable to complete the review, please nominate an alternate reviewer.

If you agree to the peer review, we ask that you complete it within two weeks (48 hours for rapid publication). Your role as a reviewer is to provide comments and suggestions for improvement and a recommendation for publication. You will be asked to complete a specific review form for the article type; all review forms include space for general comments, specific questions for each article type and space for detailed comments to the author and editor. When providing suggestions for improvements, please be aware of the word limit for the article type for which you are reviewing. Suggestions that require a significant increase in the word count may be difficult to accommodate due to the word limit. All articles are rigorously edited for English, grammar and style after the peer review process. Therefore, your review should be focused on the content, not on editing. Detailed and constructive comments, including explicit feedback on how to improve the article for publication, are preferred.

Please state the limitations of your expertise where relevant to the article. For example, if you do not have an understanding of an aspect of the article, please state so in the review comments so that the editor can seek appropriate advice as to whether this aspect is correct. A recommendation for publishing is also requested, although the Library Manager determines the final outcome based on all reviews received. These recommendations can be: ‘’accept submission’’, ‘’accept with revisions’’, ‘’submit for review’’ or ‘’decline submission’’.

Your comments will be de-identified and sent to the author for consideration. For articles whose outcome are either “accept submission” or “accept with revisions”, authors will be requested to revise the article according to the reviewer comments and to provide a separate document outlining how each reviewer comment was addressed. The Library Manager will determine if all comments were adequately addressed prior to commencing the publication process.

If the outcome of the review process is “resubmit for review”, then the same process is followed. However, the resubmitted article and responses to the reviewer comments are sent back to the original reviewers for another round of peer review. The second round of comments is then sent to the author for his or her revision. The Library Manager will assess whether both sets of reviewer comments have been adequately addressed prior to the article commencing the publication process.

We discourage the use of “decline submission” as we would prefer to work with our authors to get the article to the required standard. This option should only be recommended when the study is seriously flawed in its methodology. The publication process comprises external editing, layout and proofreading. Following these steps, each article is approved by the Editorial Board and the authors before being published on the Virtual Library.

Good practice criteria
Reviewers should evaluate submitted articles based on the following proposed working definition of good practice: practices that have shown evidence of effectiveness in improving population health when implemented in a specific real-life setting and are likely to be replicable in other settings.

A good practice should hence meet most, if not all, of nine identified evaluation criteria: Relevance, sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness, ethical appropriateness, equity/gender, possibility for scale-up/replicability, stakeholder collaboration, community involvement.

Conflicts of Interest
A conflict of interest is defined by ICMJE as “when an author or author's institution, reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions”. Conflicts of interest may be financial, institutional, research or personal. A relationship does not always represent a conflict of interest and does not necessarily preclude publication in the virtual library. All reviewers will be required to state any potential conflicts of interest, which will be assessed by the Editorial Board.