STRATEGY: a tool for the formulation of peer-review strategies

The scientific quality of the academic journal deeply relies on its peer review policy which may be guided by some cheap talk statement. However, some of these policies may fail to get executed by editors who are responsible for the processing of contributions. In this paper, the peer review strategy is defined as the smallest set of editorial decisions to optimally guide the other manuscript decisions. The chief formulates this review strategy by choosing those strategic editorial decisions optimally and having other editorial decisions align with them in the quality of collected reviews. In this process, a quality-assurance editor is in charge of the evaluation of the alignment quality of reviewer reports with each other review process. This policy thus ensures that all final decisions fit together since editors’ choices align on the announced strategic decisions. Here, we present an automatic tool, called ‘STRATEGY’, for the formulation of such peer-review strategies. Several examples illustrate the performance of the STRATEGY tool.