The Peer Review Label Steering Group has updated the requirements. The updated requirements will be in effect from 1st January 2022.

Owner of the label and right of use

The peer-review label is a trademark registered by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV). The label will indicate that the peer-review of articles and books has been performed in line with the quality and ethical criteria imposed by the academic community. The trademark owner, TSV will grant user rights to all scholarly publishers committing themselves to the terms and conditions of the label use presented on this web page.

Respectively, the publisher in question will describe on the publication channel’s website their own peer-review process and, after receiving user rights, declare their undertaking to adhere to the requirements imposed on the use of the label.

Any scholarly publisher violating these terms and conditions will risk losing the right of use, based on a decision taken by the Publication Forum Steering Group.

Requirements imposed on the peer-review process

• Manuscript has been subject to a review by two persons invited to assess and write an opinion on it at the request of the editorial staff in charge of the publication criteria (except for works based on doctoral dissertations*).
• The reviewers are PhD level researchers or other expert parties external to the editing board and independent in relation to the manuscript to be reviewed. The process can be carried out either anonymously or openly.
• The process will focus on the comprehensiveness of the material and the mastering of the theoretical framework, reliability and accuracy of the research implementation as well as the originality and novelty of the research problem or the research frame and results in relation to earlier research, according to the standards of the discipline in question.

• The publisher must send the referees' comments to the author(s) of the manuscript.
• When applying for the label, the publishers also undertake to promote, in their own publishing activities, the principles of the peer-review instructions issued by the Finnish Association of Scholarly Publishing (in Finnish only) as well as the Responsible conduct of research guidelines (pdf) published by the Advisory Board on Research Integrity (TENK).

Requirements imposed on the regular documentation of the peer-review process

• The publisher must keep regular hardcopy or electronic records of the key review information and documents related to the manuscripts accepted for the review process. The storage of the required data in an editorial system (Journal.fi or similar) is considered to be sufficient documentation.
• The data shall be stored for a period of at least five years. From the perspective of safeguarding responsible conduct of research and scientific history archiving, the permanent storage of data is recommended wherever possible. 
• Both for published and unpublished reviewed manuscripts, the recorded data must include the following information: the date when the manuscript was received, names of authors and name of manuscript, names of reviewers as well as opinions issued by the reviewers, and decisions on the publication and the dates of these decisions.
• This is not public data and will not be regularly reported to TSV. However, the publishers will commit themselves to providing TSV or TENK with the details and documents related to an individual book or article if asked to do so.
• Offering a manuscript for publication is also considered to be the author’s declaration of consent to the scholarly publisher’s peer-review practices. For this reason the scholarly publisher must notify authors and reviewers of its documentation obligation clearly and openly. When agreeing to review an article or book a reviewer is also consenting to the peer-review practices and their documentation.
• The scholarly publisher is responsible for ensuring that the editing process complies with the requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation. The privacy policy of the scholarly publisher must take into account the documentation of the peer-review process. The privacy policy of the Journal.fi service (pdf) is sufficient for those using the Journal.fi service in their editing work. It is not necessary to compile a separate privacy policy for the peer-review process. Instead, the documentation can be taken into account in the scholarly publisher’s privacy policy as follows:  model_privacy_policy.pdf

Printing of the label

• The publisher given the user rights will print the label on the individual articles or books subjected to quality assurance.
• The label should be printed in the publication in a way to unambiguously indicate which writings have been peer-reviewed. The label can refer to the entire volume if it only includes peer-reviewed texts or to individual articles if the volume includes both peer-reviewed and non-reviewed texts.
• The publisher should follow the graphic instuctions (pdf) (in Finnish, Swedish and English).

* The label should not be printed on doctoral dissertations published as such or before the public defence, because these undergo a standard evaluation process set by the responsible university. In case a new title based on the dissertation is created the label can be used on it, given that the requirements for peer-review have been met. However, only one referee suffices if the publisher has at their disposal the statements of the pre-examiners and the author’s detailed description of the changes made in the manuscript.