Peer review process

All manuscripts submitted to INRAE Productions Animales are peer-reviewed according to the following procedure:

Reception of manuscripts
After submission of an article to the journal, it is checked for compliance with the instructions to authors, in terms of scope and suitability for the journal's editorial line. Any deviation from the instructions will be subject to the judgement of the Editor-in-Chief.
Manuscripts outside the scope or not corresponding to the editorial line of the journal will be rejected by the Editor-in-Chief, and a suggestion for another journal may be made.
Manuscripts that do not meet the above presentation standards will be returned to the authors for improvement before being assigned to reviewers.

Review an revision procedure
Articles that meet the author guidelines are sent for review to 2 reviewers, in most cases, in a single-blind format. Authors are then informed of the reviewers' feedback through the publisher. The journal endeavours to provide feedback to authors within 2 to 3 months.

On the basis of the reviewers' opinions, the Editor-in-Chief may decide to reject the article, to accept it as is, or to ask the authors to make improvements to their manuscript. The requested improvements will be notified in the readers' files and, if necessary, directly in revision mode in the annotated manuscript. The editor of the journal in charge of the article may add his or her own requests and prioritise the reviewers' requests in order to guide the authors in the revision work requested.
Authors should then provide a revised version of the article that takes into account as best they can all the requests for changes to the content and form of the article. The changes made should be easily identifiable by highlighting them in yellow, without using the revision mode of Word. The revised version of the article should be accompanied by reasoned responses to the comments and requests of the readers and the journal's editorial staff. The deadline for producing the revised version of the article is usually 4 weeks.
The revised version of the article will only be resubmitted to the readers if they have requested it. Further requests for improvement may be made to the authors. The final decision to accept or reject the article is made by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.

Procedure after acceptance of the article
After checking and formatting the file, authors should check the final Word version of their article carefully for spelling and syntax, as well as the conformity of illustrations (tables, figures, boxes). The editor may ask the authors for clarification at this stage. They should also check the PDF version before final publication of the article. Authors' corrections should be kept to a minimum on the Word version and are not permitted on the PDF version. Annotations on the Word file should be made in revision mode and those on the PDF file should be made in comment mode.
PDF files may be previewed on the journal's website while waiting for all the articles in an issue to be finalised, allowing the article to be made available more quickly.