Author, Reviewer, Editor: A Generative Conversation

Our ambition is that all authors who submit their papers to PMJ should feel that their papers have been treated fairly, have improved during the review process, and have benefitted from the editors’ and reviewers’ feedback so the published paper is better than the initial submission. This is the ultimate purpose of the PMJ peer-review process, besides the obvious purpose of ensuring only publishable papers that make a contribution are accepted. We argue that a generative conversation requires authors, reviewers, and editors to work in unison; they must work together to establish a conversation that moves the paper in the right direction and makes it better. They must also understand and respect their different roles. Understanding these roles, dispelling misconceptions, uncovering genuine motivations, and promoting a developmental approach to peer reviewing are essential. We are not only looking upon this as a developmental review process, but more so, as something that is a shared concern and responsibility among editors, reviewers, and authors; something that is viewed as a knowledge development process that obviously is central to the paper at hand but also extends beyond that.