Invite an external reviewer

Outcome You give an external reviewer (such as a journal editor) an isolated copy of your complete research environment to inspect and re-run, without exposing any of your other work.

Before you start

• You are a Space Administrator of the research project.

• Your research project contains everything the reviewer needs: Applications, source code, and data.

• You understand that this approach is not suitable for double-blind anonymous review (see Limitations below).

The pattern is straightforward: take a snapshot of your work, create a dedicated instance for the reviewer, distribute the snapshot into it, then invite the reviewer to that single instance only.

Set up the reviewer Instance

1

Take a snapshot of the Instance containing your complete research environment.

See How-to › Common Workflows › Create a snapshot.

2

Create a new instance in the same space.

See Create alternate approaches above.

3

Distribute the snapshot from step 1 to the new instance.

See How-to › Common Workflows › Distribute content.

4

Invite the reviewer to the new Instance as an Instance Editor.

See Invite collaborators above.

The reviewer can now access an exact copy of your environment, re-run code, and verify your results - without seeing anything else in your organisation.

Limitations

• Not suitable for anonymous reviewers. As the Space Administrator, you create the Instance and handle invitations directly, so you will always know the identity of users in your Space.

• Reviewers cannot invite others. Instance Editor does not include the right to invite further users. If a journal editor needs to bring in additional reviewers, they cannot do so with this setup - they must ask you to extend the invitations.