Statement of Peer Review

In submitting conference proceedings to Environment Sciences Proceedings, the volume editors of these proceedings certify to the publisher that all papers published in this volume have been subjected to peer review administered by the volume editors. Reviews were conducted by expert referees with respect to the professional and scientific standards expected of a proceedings journal.

• Type of peer review: double-blind;
• Conference submission management system: The revision system used the UPM’s specific congress management system, hosted at https://eventos.upm.es/;
• Number of submissions sent for review: 37;
• Number of submissions accepted: 33;
• Acceptance rate (number of submissions accepted/number of submissions received): 89.19%;
• Average number of reviews per paper: 2;
• Total number of reviewers involved: 34;
• The revision of the 4th Conference in Geomatics Engineering was carried out according to the procedures summarized below:

At the end of the abstract submission period, the available abstracts were analyzed by the editorial committee, which considered the suitability or otherwise of the topic to be presented. Of all the abstracts presented, only one was rejected, as it was considered that the theme did not fit that of the congress. Once acceptance was communicated, the interested parties were able to send a short article within the established deadline.

When the articles arrived, the authors’ names and affiliations were erased to make them anonymous. Professors and researchers with expertise in each of the articles’ topics were sought, avoiding, as much as possible, selecting authors from the same universities as the reviewers. Two reviewers who were specialists in the subject matter of an article were selected for each of the articles. These reviewers had to accept the assignment and did so in a practically generalized way. Only one case of refusing the role of reviewer was recorded.

The reviewers anonymously issued their opinions, including in the form of a rating from 1 to 10 and the feasibility of issuing a series of comments, suggestions, or issues to be modified as necessary. The authors responded through the platform anonymously, with their responses being identifiable by a code. The authors’ responses were addressed in the first round in practically all cases. This review led to a need for the authors to explain a number of issues in more detail. The authors argued that they would not be able to do so by sticking to a set number of pages, and in these cases, the scientific committee allowed them the required enlargement.

As a result of this process, there were finally 33 short articles but also 4 abstracts that did not lead to the corresponding article. Once an article was accepted by the reviewers, it was necessary to add the authorship and affiliation information to the articles or request that it be sent again along with these data whenever necessary.

Finally, a week before the conference, the participants were asked to send their presentations, thus creating a failsafe in case there were any last-minute problems. The presentations were presented on 6–7 July according to the established schedule.