Following a successful trial of the new approach, the IJC is moving to an open peer review process. The process involves publishing the reviewer's names, affiliations and comments at the bottom of the reviewed article. There are several reasons for adopting this approach and the pros and cons of open versus anonymous/blind peer review can be found in many papers and discussions on the Internet.

As a dual open access journal, the IJC has been very successful in leading the way in open access criminology publishing. We charge nothing to publish your articles and we charge nothing for others to read them in full. The owners of the journal are working in their own time and without any external support or financing whatsoever.

In light of the popularity of the journal in the past few years, we have found it impossible to properly manage the old double/blind expert peer review process and subsequent manuscript editing. Any editor of an academic journal (many in big publishing house funded positions with secretarial help) will tell you just how time consuming this task its. Consequently, without funding or administrative support, we have developed a long backlog of unpublished and un-reviewed papers as our full-time work commitments have taken necessary priority. To deal with situation we have decided to be highly innovative.

The IJC will keep to its tradition of being better than its competitors, not because the IJC necessarily does what they do better, but because we lead the way in doing things differently to other peer reviewed scholarly journals.

Our new peer review process is simple and revolutionary and will lead to rapid publication of your paper following submission.

The New IJC Open Peer Review Process:

1. You must not submit your paper to us until you have had it reviewed and the reviewer’s comments are attached to the paper. As the author(s), you are responsible for this open peer review process and must manage the entire process from start to finish.

2. You choose and recruit your own peer reviewers. Ideally, they should be experts in the field and subject matter of your paper. If they are not, your published paper – bearing their names - will be judged by the criminological community accordingly.

3. You choose between two and four reviewers. The choice is yours.

4. You must tell the reviewer that they will be named and that their review will be included at the end of your paper – all in the one same Word file.

5. Although we recommend you do so, you do not have to take on board all or any part of their advice in their reviews. But you must publish each reviewer’s review of your paper in full at the end of your paper.

6. You are 100% legally responsible for any misrepresentation of fact regarding the content of your paper, who peer reviewed your paper and the content of their review.

7. You are 100% legally responsible for any libellous, defamatory or copyright infringement in your paper.

8. To see an example of what your paper should look like when you submit your one Word file to us as “ready to publish" please click here