About the Journal

As part of MIT CTL’s efforts to provide researchers and students with more opportunities to receive early feedback on their scholarly work, this platform is a peer review service for ready-to-submit manuscripts. This service is intended to give CTL and SCALE authors an opportunity to receive a first round of feedback on their work within an accelerated timeline before submitting a manuscript for review to a journal and/or as a pre-print to the CTL Research Paper Series.

The Pre-Peer Review Process
Once you submit your manuscript to this CTL SCALE peer review portal:
  1. Within 1 week, the editorial team will assign 2-3 reviewers to the manuscript
  2. Reviewers will have 2 weeks to review the paper and provide high-level feedback following the review templates and guidelines provided
  3. The editorial team will consolidate the reviewer feedback and return it to the authors within 1 week
The authors have the option to formally respond to the comments of the reviewers and the editor and may ask for a follow-up call to discuss any of the feedback received in person.
 
All in all, we aim for a lead time of at most 4 weeks between submitting a manuscript and receiving feedback on it. While we believe this will help improve the quality of our paper submissions, authors are obviously not required to incorporate all or any of the feedback they receive and remain free to ignore the feedback they received before proceeding with their actual journal submission.

This process is not intended to replace a full-fledged peer review process but shall provide especially more junior researchers with an additional source of feedback to increase the chances of their manuscripts when submitted to an actual journal. It shall also serve as an opportunity for authors (and reviewers) to gain some valuable experience with providing and responding to peer review feedback. For reviewers, here are the MIT CTL SCALE Peer Review Guidelines.