Inviting a Reviewer

This guide describes how to invite an external reviewer (such as a journal editor) to your research project.

Requirements

We assume the following setup is in place before inviting the external reviewer:

1. You have a research space with an instance containing your complete research setup: applications, source code, and data.

2. You are the space administrator of the research space.

Your goal is to achieve the following:

• Your reviewer should have access to an exact copy of your complete research setup.

• Your reviewer may want to re-run parts or all of your code to verify or reproduce your research.

• Your reviewer should not have access to anything else in your organization beyond the copy of your research setup.

Solution

Follow these steps in order:

1. Create a snapshot of the instance containing your complete research environment.

2. Create a new instance in the same space where you're conducting your research.

3. Distribute the snapshot from step 1 to the instance created in step 2.

4. Invite the journal editor to the instance from step 2 as an instance editor.

This setup satisfies all the criteria outlined in the previous section.

Limitations

This approach is specifically designed for the use case described in the requirements section.

Anonymity

This setup is 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.

Role Proliferation

Another potential use case involves allowing the invited user to invite additional users to the space. An instance editor does not have the necessary permissions to do this. Specifically, if a journal editor wants to invite colleagues to the project, they cannot do so with this setup.