Once the manuscript is received by the journal office, a blind copy is sent to the editorial board for initial reviewing. The comments of editorial board are discussed in the weekly meetings of the editorial board. Possible decisions in this step may be rejection, requiring minor revisions before being sent to the reviewers or sufficient enough to be sent to the reviewers. A notification letter, along with the article code for all further correspondences, is sent to the corresponding author. Those articles with sufficient quality for peer-reviewing are sent to four experts in the field to be reviewed via a double-blinded process. As soon as receiving at least 2 reviewers’ comments, they are discussed in the editorial board meeting. Possible decisions in this step may be accepting as it is, requiring revision to be published or rejection. In the case of needing revision the reviewers’ comments are forwarded to the corresponding author for final revision. After receiving the revised manuscript, provided that the authors fulfill all reviewers’ comments, the manuscript is scheduled for publication in the next issue. As Addiction & Health is a rapid response journal, the review process takes between 4 to 8 weeks. The review process follows a double-blind manner.
Addiction & Health's decision letter determines the status of manuscript in four ways:
1. Acceptance: the manuscript could be published online. Before online publication, the corresponding author should verify a proof copy of the paper. The journal supports the Advance Access initiative by which papers that have been copy edited and typeset but not yet paginated for inclusion in an issue of the journal are appeared online upon finishing with the review process. Advance accessed papers will be in a queue to be published in one of the journal’s upcoming issues.
2. Minor Revision: The authors will receive comments on their manuscript and will be asked to submit a revised copy (showing all changes they have made to the manuscript using Track and Change or highlighted colour) beside a response to reviewer file in which they need to respond to each and every comment of reviewer one by one (for each reviewer separately).
3. Major Revision: This means a chance to reorganize the manuscript to meet the required scientific criteria for another review process. The authors are asked to submit a revised copy (showing all changes they have made to the manuscript using Track and Change or highlighted colour) beside a response to reviewer file in which they need to respond to each and every comment of reviewer one by one (for each reviewer separately).
Revisions should be submitted in 7 weeks after decision letter. Otherwise, authors need to go through a resubmission process.
4. Rejection: The manuscript could be rejected either in the initial evaluation by the editors (due to incompatibility with the Journal's aims and scope, low quality of the manuscript, or lack of priority) or after the review process. In most cases, methodological and scientific concerns are the main causes of rejection. Causes of rejection will be sent to the authors to provide more chance for them for publication in other journals.
Editing
Accepted manuscripts will be edited according to the Addiction and Health’s Guide for Authors (our journal provides English language service to non-English speaking authors too) and returned to the corresponding author for final approval. All contributing authors are responsible for all statements made in their manuscript during editing and production that are authorized by the corresponding author.
Corrections
Requests for publishing corrections should be sent to the editorial office. Corrections will be reviewed by editors and are published immediately and linked online to the original paper.