The American Ornithological Society (AOS) is commencing a pilot program to provide graduate students with little or no experience in reviewing manuscripts an opportunity to work with our associate editors to gain this experience. In this program, associate editors for our two journals, soon to be renamed Ornithology and Ornithological Applications, will have the option to invite a self-identified graduate student reviewer to review a manuscript, along with two other reviewers. The student reviewer will review the manuscript anonymously—our current policy for all reviews—and will have access to the other manuscript reviews and the editor-in-chief’s decision, all of which are transmitted to the authors. While not a mentored process, this experience will provide students with insights that can help them become excellent reviewers. Instructions and guidance on manuscript review will be available for students participating in this program.
Steps to become a graduate student reviewer
- Interested graduate students will first need to register with Editorial Manager, the AOS journal submission site.
- After registering with Editorial Manager, applicants should follow up with an email to aospubs@americanornithology.org stating that you have registered as a reviewer.
- Registrants will be assigned the role of reviewer; associate editors will then be able to easily identify and invite student reviewers from the reviewer database.
- Graduate students who are already in our reviewer database and have provided reviews for us in the past do not need to repeat this registration process or self-identify as student reviewers. This program is designed for those students with little or no experience who want to gain more.
We are thrilled to offer this learning opportunity to a new cohort of student reviewers and will use all feedback offered to us by participants to continually improve the program.