The academic editor, i.e., the Editor-in-Chief in the case of regular submissions, or the Guest Editor in the case of Special Issue submissions, or an Editorial Board member in case of a conflict of interest and of regular submissions if the Editor-in-Chief allows, will be notified of the submission and invited to perform a check and recommend reviewers. Academic editors can decide to continue with the peer-review process, reject a manuscript, or request revisions before peer-review.

Guest Editors of Special Issues are not able to take decisions regarding their own manuscripts submitted to their Special Issue, as this would constitute a conflict of interest. An Editorial Board member will instead be responsible for decision making. The Guest Editor will be unable to access the review process except in their role as author. Similarly, Editors-in-Chief, or other Editorial Board members are not able to access the review process of their manuscript except in their role as author.

Peer-review
From submission to final decision or publication, one dedicated Journal staff member coordinates the review process and serves as the main point of contact for authors, academic editors and reviewers.

Physical Development Planning operate double-blind peer-review, where in addition to the author not knowing the identity of the reviewer, the reviewer is unaware of the author’s identity.

At least two review reports are collected for each submitted article. Suggestions of reviewers can be made by the academic editor during pre-check. Alternatively, Physical Development Planning editorial staff will use qualified Editorial Board members, qualified reviewers from our database, or new reviewers identified by web searches for related articles.

Authors can recommend potential reviewers. Physical Development Planning staff ensure that there are no potential conflicts of interest and will not consider those with competing interests. Authors can also enter the names of potential peer-reviewers they wish to exclude from consideration in the peer-review of their manuscript, during the initial submission of the manuscript. The editorial team will respect these requests as long as they do not interfere with the objective and thorough assessment of the submission.

The following checks are applied to all reviewers:

• That they hold no conflicts of interest with the authors, including if they have published together in the last five years;
• That they hold a PhD (exceptions are made in some fields, e.g., medicine);
• They must have recent publications in the field of the submitted paper;
• They have not recently been invited to review a manuscript for any Article.

Reviewers who accept to review a manuscript are expected to:

• Have the necessary expertise to judge manuscript quality;
• Provide quality review reports and remain responsive throughout peer-review;
• Maintain standards of professionalism and ethics.

Reviewers who accept a review invitation are provided 7–10 days to write their review via our online platform,

For the review of a revised manuscript, reviewers are asked to provide their report within three days. Extensions can also be granted on request.