Maintaining the integrity of what we publish is vital to the confidence of customers and other stakeholders in our products and services. The Reed Elsevier Editorial Policy makes explicit our responsibility for accuracy and fairness in all we do. It reinforces editorial policies in place in the RE divisions. For example, all papers submitted to Elsevier’s primary research journals undergo peer review. This means that once received from the author, editors send papers to specialist researchers in the field. In the vast majority of disciplines, this is done anonymously – thus the author will not be given the name of the peer reviewer. In some fields double-blind peer review takes place – the author will not be told who the peer reviewers are, nor will the peer reviewers be told the author’s identity. Read more about peer review.
During 2008, Elsevier launched reference linking, a new service enabling its community of reviewers direct access to referenced articles published by Elsevier, directly from the manuscript they are reviewing. Through the Elsevier Editorial System, Elsevier’s network of 7,000 journal editors and 500,000 reviewers have access to over nine million articles in Elsevier’s ScienceDirect and Scopus databases. In the year, Elsevier also launched the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit to offer guidance to editors on dealing with disputes. The growth in electronic publishing and the wider dissemination of research make it easier for authors, editors and reviewers to identify questionable papers.