Preliminary review is done when the manuscript is proposed (and either accepted or rejected) to the publishing program of the Society. Proper peer review process begins after the manuscript has been sent to the Society. These guidelines are followed in the series published by the Society. The outline of the process is the following:
- The Society chooses at least two independent referees and requests their review. The referees are independent in relation to the reviewed manuscript.
- The review is either single blind (only referee is anonymous) or double blind (both referee and author are anonymous). In some cases, completely open review (no one is anonymous) may be used. This is decided on a case-by-case basis. Single-blind is usually used for Festschrifts and article collections based on conferences.
- For monographs, the reviewers are chosen for the whole manuscript; for article collections, the referees are chosen for parts of the collection or individual articles. For dissertations, grounds for publication are in the publishing permit given by the faculty.
- “The process will focus on the comprehensiveness of the material and the mastering of the theoretical framework, reliability and accuracy of the research implementation as well as the originality and novelty of the results in relation to earlier research, according to the standards of the discipline in question.” (Federation of Finnish Learned Societies)
- The referees give their reviews to the Society. In addition to the review process outlined above, the referees will give a proposal on publishing, whether the manuscript can be published (a) not at all, (b) after significant changes, (c) after minor changes or (d) as it is. The Society refrains from publishing manuscripts that are not accepted in the peer review. An approving review can be quite short.
- For monographs, the reviews or their summaries are given to the author. For article collections, the reviews are given to the editor of the individual book, who delivers the reviews or their summary to the author. The author is supposed to enhance the manuscript in accordance with the corrections proposed in the review before the manuscript is printed.
All authors, editors and reviews, both concerning monographs and collective works, ought to remind themselves that information of the peer review process is archived by the Society according to the instructions of Federation of Finnish Learned Societies.
Editors of article collections are requested to provide suggestions for peer reviewers.
The Society uses the peer review label of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies and is committed to following the guidelines and provisions therewith required.