The purpose of Lake and Reservoir Management (LRM) is to bring advances in lake management to the attention of scientists, managers and policy makers. Articles represent considerable work by authors and involve extensive peer review, but articles do not represent the last word on any topic. The review process is not infallible, and there can be alternative interpretations of results. Additionally, experience from other lake studies may lead to different conclusions for geographic or other reasons, and may add to our overall understanding of lake processes and conditions. Ideally, such additional experience is presented in manuscripts that become peer reviewed articles in LRM, but this is not always possible, and sometimes it is worth commenting on an article sooner than the time frame required for processing a complete manuscript. Consequently, LRM offers readers the opportunity to comment on articles, potentially furthering our understanding faster, and allowing useful discourse in a public forum. The management of LRM encourages such comments when they add substantively to the scientific fundamentals or practical applications relating to an article published previously in LRM. Comments have not been common in LRM, but they are certainly not discouraged, and this note provides guidelines for structuring comments appropriate for publication in LRM.
All submissions for consideration as comments will undergo a peer review process. As rapid publication of comments is desired to be responsive where there is information to add that will affect the use of the original article in lake management efforts, the peer review process will be accelerated. Statements in comments must stand up to the same level of scrutiny as material in published articles. LRM is not a social medium; whether one likes or dislikes an article is not worthy of publication. Opinion matters only to the extent that it can be justified. A certain amount of speculation is allowable, as it is in published articles, as long as it is presented as speculation and offers plausible interpretation that might be tested at some future date. Authors of comments should consider the following:
| 1. | Submit promptly – there is no official time limit on comments, but it is strongly preferred that comments appear within two issues of the article about which comments are being made. | ||||
| 2. | Be concise - Comments should be relatively brief and very focused; no more than one page should be needed in final form (about 1.5 pages in the submitted comment). Keep to the subject material and make clear points in support of or disagreement with statements from the subject article. | ||||
| 3. | Justify statements – Graphs and tables are not necessary, but can be used to support a position. Substantial new data, however, should be the subject of a complete paper submitted for the normal review process. | ||||
| 4. | Identify speculation and interpretation - Less substantiated lines of reasoning should be qualified, either directly (e.g., “Based on …, it is possible that …”) or by posing them as questions (e.g., “Is it possible that …?”). | ||||
| 5. | Be respectful – Personal attacks are unacceptable. While LRM is about lake management, articles represent sincere effort by many people, and those people and that effort will be respected by material printed in LRM. Question data and interpretation, not ability and motives. | ||||
Authors will be granted the opportunity to respond to comments, with the comment and response appearing together if at all possible. The same guidelines above apply to author responses.