R&D Board · Reviewers
Guidelines for peer reviewers
Reviewers are approved by the Board, work double-blind and complete reviews in the R&D & Journal portal. The role is voluntary, not monetized and remote.
R&D Board · Reviewers
Guidelines for peer reviewers
1. Accepting an invitation
- Accept only if the paper is within your expertise and you can finish within 21 days.
- Decline and tell the editor if you recognise the author or have any conflict of interest.
- You confirm no conflict in the portal before you can open the manuscript.
2. What to assess
- Originality and relevance to converged security.
- Relevance to converged security; engagement with the GCSB Converged Security Framework is welcome but not required.
- Community and industry value of the findings.
- Soundness of method, data and analysis.
- Whether conclusions follow from the evidence.
- Clarity, structure and quality of references.
- Ethical issues: plagiarism, missing approvals, undisclosed AI use.
3. Writing the review
- Comments to the author: specific, constructive and courteous; never identify yourself.
- Confidential comments to the editor: anything the author should not see.
- Recommendation: Accept, Minor revision, Major revision or Reject.
4. Confidentiality
- Do not share, copy or keep the manuscript, and do not upload it to AI tools.
- Do not contact the author.
- Your reviewer appointment may be publicly acknowledged or verified; your identity as reviewer of a particular manuscript is not disclosed to its authors or readers.
Open access
Copyright and reuse
Authors retain copyright and grant GCSB a non-exclusive licence to publish. Published Journal articles are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
You may share and adapt the work for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the licence and indicate any changes. You must not imply endorsement or impose additional legal or technological restrictions. Third-party material identified as excluded in a credit line requires separate permission where applicable. This licence does not apply to confidential submissions or unrelated GCSB materials.
Zenodo repository and DOIs
Final approved publications are deposited in the GCSB Zenodo community, where all Converged Security Framework standards, procedures and playbooks are already published with registered DOIs. Eligible articles without an existing DOI receive a free Zenodo DOI when the deposit is published following community acceptance. Articles with an existing DOI retain it. No submission, review or publication fee is charged. A reserved DOI is not yet registered, and deposit does not guarantee external indexing. Confidential submissions and private drafts are excluded.
Read the CC BY 4.0 licence