Information for Reviewers
All reviewers must submit their reviews via ACS Paragon Plus, which provides complete access to all publishable parts of the manuscript and will save a copy of your comments in case a second round of reviews is needed. All expertise information and surveys are also collected inside ACS Paragon Plus.
Reviewers should give estimates of the scientific value of the work, together with some basis for their opinion. They should indicate whether the writing is clear, concise, and relevant. Personal comments should be avoided.
ACS Publications journals ask for the expert opinion of consulted reviewers and expect that those opinions are those solely of the reviewer (with occasional exceptions noted in the ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research). Additionally, third party services such as AI tools may store or use any information provided as a prompt to generate future text, which could result in a breach of the confidentiality of the peer review process. As stated in the ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research "A reviewer should treat both the manuscript and data received from the journal, their review report, and related correspondence, as confidential". Disclosing any part of the submission or the peer review report itself to a text generation service (or any other third-party tool) is a breach of this confidentiality, and thus a violation of the ACS Ethical Guidelines. For more information on use of AI, please review the ACS AI Best Practices and Policy.
For further reviewer education, we encourage all researchers to enroll in the free online course, ACS Reviewer Lab.
For the convenience of our authors, ACS offers a Manuscript Transfer Service. If the author accepts an offer to refer the manuscript to a different ACS journal, your review of the manuscript will also be transferred. Please be assured that your review will be handled by ACS with the same confidentiality in the next ACS journal as in the original journal. Note that your review may also be shared by the authors independently.
