For information on Ethics in Publishing and Ethical guidelines for journal publication see http://www.elsevier.com/publishingethics and http://www.elsevier.com/ethicalguidelines
All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work. See also http://www.elsevier.com/conflictsofinterest
Every peer-reviewed research article appearing in this journal will be published open access. This means that the article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format immediately after publication. The author does not have any publication charges for open access. The International Open Benchmark Council will pay to make the article open access. However, at least one of the authors must register BenchCouncil International Symposium on Benchmarking, Measuring and Optimizing (Bench) (https://www.benchcouncil.org/bench/) and present their work.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) For non-commercial purposes, lets others distribute and copy the article, and to include in a collective work (such as an anthology), as long as they credit the author(s) and provided they do not alter or modify the article.
This journal operates a double anonymized review process. All contributions are typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the paper's scientific quality. The Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding the acceptance or rejection of articles. The Editor's decision is final. Editors are not involved in decisions about papers that they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has a conflict of interest. Any such submission is subject to the journal's usual procedures, with peer review handled independently of the relevant editor and their research groups.
More information on types of peer review is as follows.
1. All manuscripts would be pre-checked by the editorial office. Any submission that fails to meet the basic standard of the journal would be desk rejected for reasons like out of scope, ethical issues, high similarities, etc. Then, the editorial office would assign the submission to Editor-in-Chief, an Associate Editor-in-Chief, or an Editorial Board member.
2. The editor would invite multiple reviewers to review this paper.
3. After at least two reviewers provide their review reports and comments, the editor would provide feedback based on review comments to the authors.
4. When the author submits the revised manuscript, the editor would recommend a decision to the Editorial Office.
5. The Editorial Office will make a final decision based on reviewers' comments and the editor's recommendation.
6. For submissions from Editors-in-Chief, Associate Editor-in-Chief, or an Editorial Board member, other journal editors will handle them independently.
This journal uses double anonymized review, which means the authors' identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa. More information is available on our website. To facilitate this, please include the following separately: Title page (with author details): This should include the title, authors' names, affiliations, acknowledgments, any Declaration of Interest statement, and a complete address for the corresponding author, including an e-mail address. Anonymized manuscript (no author details): The main body of the paper (including the references, figures, tables, and any acknowledgments) should not include any identifying information, such as the authors' names or affiliations.