In line with Diamond Open Access Journal ethics, Tektonika promotes a fair, transparent, and open evaluation process for submitted manuscripts. 

As such, the reviewer’s reports, as well as the authors’ responses to reviews, will become public at the same time as the accepted paper is published by the journal. In the same spirit of scientific openness, and towards fostering active and constructive community discussion, Tektonika will set up a post-publication commenting system (moderated by editors), where registered researchers can post comments and questions to the authors of published papers.

The Tektonika editorial team emphasizes that the main purpose of the review process is to verify the scientific soundness of submitted manuscripts while helping improve their quality in an interactive process involving the authors, the reviewers, and editors.

1. Tektonika’s review form

Tektonika's review form is aimed at streamlining the peer-review process for reviewers, authors, and editors. 

> This form is optional, and highly flexible. Reviewers maychoose to fill all sections of the form, some of them, or  submit a free-form review instead. 

> We encourage reviewers to read the guidance below and familiarise themselves with the form’s content by downloading it before starting the review and making a decision about their review's format.

> An annotated version of the manuscript may be uploaded as part of the review.

The form contains two types of questions: YES/NO statements (to succintly evaluate the form of the research), and  free-form text boxes, to ellaborate on the content of the research (merit, originality, validity and relevance). 

Tektonika's review form allows for maximum flexibility. For example:

• Should research be presented with insufficient clarity for the reviewer to easily assess its quality, reviewers may choose to answer to YES/NO statements only, and provide short comments to help improve the manuscript's clarity or structure.
• Should research be clearly and effectively communicated, reviewers may choose to review exclusively the manuscript's scientific content (merit, originality, validity and relevance), predominantly using the free text boxes while skipping or answering only a few of the YES/NO statements

In both cases and in-between, reviewers are requested to provide an overall evaluation and description of a manuscript's main merits and points of improvement.

Authors are required to respond to each of the reviewers’ comments on a point-by-point basis. 

This review form aims to streamline Tektonika’s peer-review process and provide a structure that supports constructive feedback to authors. It is meant to guide unambiguous comments by reviewers on different aspects of the manuscript, facilitate revision and response by the authors, and swift and fair decisions by the editors. 

2. Tektonika’s review process: 

2.1 - Authors that submit their manuscript to the Tektonika website will have the possibility to choose:

• A double-blind review process, whereby authors and reviewers are anonymous.
• A "visible" review process, whereby authors' and reviewers’ identities are disclosed. Tektonika aims to make all aspects of science open, but editors will consider requests from reviewers to grant anonymity to their comments.

2.2 - Authors are encouraged to preprint their manuscripts, in preprint platforms like ArXiv, EarthArXiv or ESSOAr, as means of obtaining feedback from the wider community.

2.3 - Authors are required to post all datasets and supplementary material, needed to enable unbiased critique of the work, on a relevant public repository (e.g., Pangea, Mendeley Data, Zenodo…) and clearly link to them in the manuscript (i.e., by citing the data DOI in the text and/or the Data Availability section). Editors and reviewers will check the openness of data used in the study. In case proprietary and/or confidential data are used, which the authors' cannot make public, the editor and/or reviewers should assess if the lack of these data hinders the objective critique of the presented work and can decide to allow/deny publication accordingly.

2.4 - After a first check by the editorial board (e.g., minimum scientific and formal soundness, plagiarism) the manuscript is assigned to an Associate Editor (AE). The AE will be in charge of managing the review process (contacting reviewers, receiving and synthesizing reviewer’s reports, reaching a decision in concert with the Executive Editors (EE), receiving authors’ revision, etc), to reach a final decision to accept the manuscript or not. In the review model used by Tektonika, this process will remain confidential until the manuscript is accepted.

2.5 - During the submission process (on the OJS system), the authors:

• Are asked to suggest at least three reviewers, with a brief justification of their suitability to review the submitted work.
• May provide a list of reviewers to be avoided and should explain why. Requests will be carefully considered.

2.6 - Invited reviewers are asked to disclose any links with the authors - e.g., collaborative, personal, institutional, scientific conflict. Editors will decide if the reviewer is appropriate to review the manuscript.

2.7 - Reviewers are given four weeks to review manuscripts. This deadline can be extended at the discretion of the handling editor(s).

2.8 - Reviewers are encouraged to use the Tektonika review form to suggest ways of improving the manuscripts and may provide an annotated version of the original submission. The editors will base their decision to accept/revise/reject the paper on the review reports, the annotated submission (when suitable), and their own evaluation of the submitted manuscript. 

2.9 - Upon acceptance, a manuscript becomes public in diamond open access (no publication costs for authors and no access cost for readers), together with the review reports and authors’ responses to reviews. At that stage, manuscripts will become open to comment by the community (people will need to register with the Hypothes.is plugin on the Tektonika website to comment).

2.10 - Should a manuscript be rejected, the entire submission and peer-review process remain confidential. In this case, no document is published (not the submission, nor reviewer’s reports, nor author’s answers).