Peer Review Process

All scholarly content in the Journal of Constitutional Change is subject to double-anonymous peer review: authors do not know the identity of reviewers, and reviewers are not told the identity of authors. This applies to Articles, Comparative Notes, Amendment Watch reports, Review Essays, Replies and every contribution to a guest-edited symposium, including contributions by members of the editorial board.

Stage 1 — Editorial screening

Every submission is read by at least one editor within fourteen days of receipt. Screening asks four questions: is the manuscript within scope; does it satisfy the comparative engagement requirement; are its primary legal materials verifiable; and is it complete and anonymised? Manuscripts are returned without external review where they:

fall outside the scope stated in Focus and Scope;
describe a jurisdiction without engaging the comparative literature on constitutional change;
rely on constitutional provisions, judgments or drafting records that cannot be verified, or that are cited only through secondary or unattributed translations;
duplicate work already published by the author, in any language, without disclosure;
omit the statements required at submission (AI use, constitutional engagement, funding, competing interests, authorship contributions); or
are so far from publishable English that the argument cannot be assessed. Language alone is not a ground for desk rejection where the argument is clear; see the note on language support below.

Screening decisions are communicated with a short statement of reasons. The Journal considers it a failure of editorial duty to keep an author waiting for months only to decline a manuscript on a ground that was apparent on the day it arrived.

Stage 2 — Assignment of reviewers

Manuscripts that pass screening are sent to a minimum of two external reviewers. Reviewers are selected for subject expertise, not seniority, and the Journal actively recruits early-career scholars alongside established ones.

The cross-jurisdictional rule. At least one of the reviewers of every manuscript works principally on a jurisdiction other than the one the manuscript studies, and is based in a different country from the corresponding author. This rule exists to test the Journal's central requirement: that an argument about constitutional change must persuade a reader who does not share the author's constitutional assumptions. Where a manuscript is genuinely comparative across several systems, the editors ensure that the reviewers between them cover the principal jurisdictions discussed.

Reviewers must decline where they have a conflict of interest, including co-authorship or collaboration within the preceding three years, or institutional affiliation with an author whose identity they believe they can infer, or a professional role in the constitutional change under discussion. Reviewers who recognise an author must inform the editors, who will decide whether the review may still be relied upon.

Stage 3 — The review itself

The Journal publishes the questions it asks reviewers, so that authors know in advance the standard against which their work will be judged. Reviewers are asked to answer each in a paragraph or more, and to write reports that an author can act on.

What does this manuscript add to the study of constitutional change that was not already known? Is the claim novel, or a careful restatement, or neither?
Comparative legibility. Would a scholar working on a different jurisdiction learn something usable? Does the manuscript engage the comparative literature, or cite it decoratively?
Primary materials. Are the constitutional provisions, judgments and drafting records accurately cited, correctly translated and fairly characterised? Identify any proposition of law you cannot verify.
Argument and execution. Is the argument sound, the structure coherent, the evidence sufficient, and the treatment of contrary authority honest?

Reviewers then give a confidential recommendation to the editors. Reports that consist only of a recommendation, or that address the author rather than the argument, are not forwarded; the editors will seek a further review instead.

Stage 4 — Decision

Decisions are taken by the handling editor on the basis of the reports, and are one of: accept; minor revisions; major revisions; reject and resubmit; or reject. Where reviewers disagree materially, a third review is obtained before a decision is taken. The editors are not bound by reviewer recommendations, but any decision that departs from them is explained to the author and recorded in the editorial file.

Revised manuscripts are accompanied by a point-by-point response. Manuscripts returned after major revisions are normally sent to the original reviewers; manuscripts returned after minor revisions are assessed by the handling editor.

Published timelines

The following are the Journal's targets and outer limits, stated so that authors can plan and so that the Journal can be measured against something specific. Where a target will be missed the author is told before it passes and given a revised date. Because a table of intentions proves nothing, the Journal publishes its actual median times each December alongside the figures below.

Stage	Target	Maximum
Acknowledgement of submission	3 days	7 days
Editorial screening decision	14 days	21 days
First decision after external review	10 weeks	14 weeks
Decision on revised manuscript	4 weeks	6 weeks
Acceptance to online publication	8 weeks	12 weeks

Confidentiality and reviewer conduct

Manuscripts under review are confidential documents. Reviewers may not share, cite, circulate or use them, may not retain copies after submitting their report, and may not enter any part of a manuscript into a generative artificial-intelligence system — see the AI Tool Policy. A reviewer who wishes to consult a colleague must obtain the editors' permission, and the colleague's contribution must be declared and is then subject to the same obligations.

Recognition of reviewers

Reviewing is scholarly labour and the Journal records it. With their consent, reviewers are listed annually in the December issue; reviews are logged to reviewers' ORCID records where they permit it; and the editors will confirm a reviewer's service in writing for promotion or tenure purposes on request. Individual reviews remain anonymous, except where a reviewer and all authors separately agree to publication of a report alongside the article under the opt-in procedure described in the Copyright Notice.

Submissions by editors and board members

Editors and editorial board members may submit to the Journal, subject to strict separation. Such manuscripts are handled by an editor with no professional relationship to the author; the submitting editor has no access to the editorial file, the identity of reviewers or the decision process, and this is enforced through OJS permissions rather than by undertaking alone. The proportion of content authored by editors and board members is reported in the annual editorial statistics and is capped at fifteen per cent of the items published in any volume. The Editor-in-Chief publishes no research article in the Journal during its first two volumes. A journal that becomes an outlet for the people who run it has stopped being a journal.

Symposia and guest editors

Symposium proposals are assessed by the editors against the Journal's scope and are accepted only where the collection would not simply reproduce a conference programme. Guest editors are named in the published symposium, are bound by this policy and by the Publication Ethics statement, and may not review or decide on a contribution by a co-author, colleague or student of their own. Guest editors do not take final decisions: they propose reviewers and make recommendations, and every contribution — including any by a guest editor — is decided by a member of the standing editorial team. A symposium may not consist predominantly of contributions by its guest editors.

Language support

JCC is published in English, but most of the constitutional change worth studying happens in other languages. The Journal does not reject a manuscript at screening for imperfect English where the argument is clear, and provides copy-editing for accepted manuscripts at no charge, with substantive language assistance where editorial capacity allows. Authors are not asked to purchase a language-editing certificate, and the Journal neither requires nor recommends any commercial editing service.

Appeals

Authors may appeal a decision once, in writing, within thirty days, on the ground that a review contains a material error of fact or that the process departed from this policy. Appeals are considered by an editor who was not involved in the original decision, and dissatisfaction with a reviewer's judgement is not by itself a ground for appeal. The outcome of an appeal is final as to the editorial decision. It does not affect anyone's ability to raise a question of research or publication integrity, which is handled separately under the Publication Ethics statement.

Editorial statistics

Each December the Journal publishes the number of submissions received, the desk-rejection rate, the overall acceptance rate, the median times to first decision and to publication, the proportion of items authored by editors and board members, and the distribution of authors and reviewers by world region. Figures are given as counts and medians only, and are aggregated by region rather than by country and career stage, so that no individual reviewer can be identified from a small cell. A journal that asks authors for transparency owes them the same.