Guide for Editors

Welcome to the guide for notebooks editors of the EDS book!

Before you begin this process, please be sure to understand how the publication process works.

We have a code of conduct which is mandatory for everyone involved in the review process of our notebooks.

Below you will find the main steps we suggest to follow as an editor of a notebook to EDS book.

Scope and Aims

Thank you for considering managing the review workflow of a notebook submission to EDS book. Our review process aims to be open, collaborative, transparent and inclusive. We therefore welcome editors from a diversity of background and with varying levels of programming/domain expertise.

Pre-review

Once a notebook idea comes in, it will be validated by Editors-in-Chief (EiC). From there, it moves to a PRE-REVIEW issue, where EIC will assign an editor (or a volunteering editor self-assigns).

Important

If you receive an invite as the editor by EiC, please response within 1 week your availability.

Finding Reviewers

The editor’s job is to identify reviewers (or validate authors’ suggestions) who have sufficient expertise in the field of software and/in the domain of the submission. EDS book notebooks have to have a minimum of two reviewers per submission. In some cases, the editor also might want to formally add themself as one of the reviewers. If the editor feels particularly unsure of the submission, a third reviewer can be recruited.

If you wish, you can use the email template below to invite reviewers.

Note

The review invitation follows pyOpenSci reviewer request template.

Hi, this is [EDITOR-Name]. 
I'm writing to ask if you have time to review a notebook for the Environmental Data Science (EDS) book. 
EDS book has an open peer review of computational notebooks that support environmental science. 
Accepted notebooks become a part of our EDS book notebooks gallery. 
Our review process is similar to that of open journals however it focuses on ensuring high quality notebooks that are reusable to the Environmental science community.

The notebook, [NOTEBOOK NAME] by [AUTHOR(S)], does [FUNCTION]. 
You can find it on GitHub here: [REPO LINK]. 
We conduct our open review process via GitHub as well, here: [PRE-REVIEW ISSUE]

If you accept, note that we ask reviewers to complete reviews in two weeks.

Our [reviewers guide](pb-guidelines-reviewers) details what we look for in a notebook review, and includes links to example reviews.
We also include a reviewer template on that page that you can use to guide your review. 

If you have time, please have a look at the notebook first, to make sure that you do not have a conflict of interest with the notebook authors.

If you have questions or feedback, feel free to ask me.

Are you able to review? If you can not, I welcome any suggestions that you have for other reviewers. 
If I don't hear from you within a week, I will assume that you are unable to review this package at this time.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

[EDITOR]
EDS book editor.

Once reviewers have been found, the editor will update the heading at the top of the issue with [REVIEWER1 GITHUB HANDLE], [REVIEWER2 GITHUB HANDLE] after Reviewer: section.

Review

EiC will open a REVIEW issue containing some instructions with the review checklist, one per reviewer. Reviewers should check off items of the checklist one-by-one, until done. In the meantime, reviewers can engage the authors freely in a conversation aimed at improving the notebook. The editor lurks on this conversation and comes in if needed for questions (or CoC issues). Comments in the REVIEW issue should be kept general with more lengthy suggestions or requests posted directly in the PR opened by EiC in the notebook repository. The authors should implement changes in their personal repository and not in the forked repository. The authors should open a PR to the forked repository to update the notebook version for review. EiC merges the PR in the review branch. The editor should confirm the reviewers are satisfied with the changes and ask them to re-evaluate the notebook. When reviewers are satisfied with the improvements, the editor asks to confirm their recommendation to accept the submission. Then the editor pings EiC to inform the notebook is ready to the post-print stage.

Expectations on EDS book editors

Responding to editorial assignments

We ask that editors respond their availability to edit a new submission in a timely fashion (within 1 week).

Continued attention to assigned submissions

Editors are responsible that submissions progress smoothly through the editorial process.

In general aim for 2 weeks for review, 2 weeks for subsequent changes, and 1 week for reviewer approval of changes.

If a review has not been submitted after 2 weeks, ping the reviewer(s) within the REVIEW issue to ensure they are aware of the 2 week deadline.

Sometimes reviews go stale, either because reviewers fail to complete their review or an author has been slow to respond to a reviewers’ feedback.

As the editor, we need you to ping the author/or reviewer(s) to ensure they are aware of the 2 week deadline unless there’s a clear statement in the REVIEW issue that says an action is coming at a slightly later time.