Peer review declaration

All papers published in this volume of IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering have been peer reviewed through processes administered by the Editors. Reviews were conducted by expert referees to the professional and scientific standards expected of a proceedings journal published by IOP Publishing. ● Type of peer review: Double-blind ● Conference submission management system: University Repository ● Number of submissions received: 203 ● Number of submissions sent for review: 189 ● Number of submissions accepted: 141 ● Acceptance Rate (Number of Submissions Accepted / Number of Submissions Received X 100): 69.45 % ● Average number of reviews per paper: 3 ● Total number of reviewers involved: 298 ● Any additional info on review process: No ● Contact person for queries: Ali Al-Rifaie, PhD. Email: ali.alrifaie@mu.edu.iq All manuscripts that had been submitted to ICEST2020 were firstly rigorously checked by the editors involved for similarity using Turnitin software considering a similarity index of less than 20%. Manuscripts with a similarity index higher than 20% will be rejected. Whilst, those with an acceptable similarity index will be evaluated by the editors in terms of the importance of inputs and outputs provided and English language. Then, the manuscripts will be sent to four reviewers for evaluation. In addition to the manuscript in PDF form, the ICEST Team will send a review report to the reviewers to perform the evaluation process. A copy of the review report can be seen in the attachment. The reviewers will be asked to complete the review within enough time ranged between (15-25 days). After the completion of peer-review by at least two reviewers, the editors will send the reviewer comments to the corresponding author for required action. The second-round of review may be required only for manuscripts need major modifications. However, for those with minor modifications, the editors can check the author response to reviewer comments and make the final decision of either tentative acceptance or secondround of review decision. The tentative acceptance will be followed by the final acceptance after the corresponding author completing the process of payment fees. Besides, manuscripts that need second-round review may be rejected or accepted according to the author response. Similar payment procedure will be implemented for the manuscripts with major modifications in case of acceptance.