Statement of Peer Review for the Proceedings for the 16th International Aluminium Conference—INALCO 2026

1. Volume Editor and Committee

The signatory of this statement, Sigmund Arntsønn Tronvoll, served as the volume editor of these proceedings and as Academic Editor, with David Morin serving as Academic Editor on selected papers to manage cases with conflicts of interest.

The peer-review process was agreed upon by the INALCO 2026 Local Organizing Committee, which comprised the following members from NTNU—Norwegian University of Science and Technology: Trond Furu (Adjunct Professor at NTNU and Senior Principal Scientist at Hydro), Bjørn Holmedal, Randi Holmestad, Knut Marthinsen, David Morin, Odd Sture Hopperstad, Sigmund Arntsønn Tronvoll, and Torgeir Welo; and the following members from SINTEF: Siri Marthe Arbo, Dirk Nolte, and Xiaobo Ren.

2. Metrics and Specifications

• Type of peer review: Single-blind;
• Conference submission management system: EventsAir;
• Number of paper submissions sent for review (excluding withdrawn): 39;
• Number of papers accepted: 36;
• Acceptance rate: 92%;
• Reviews per paper: 2;
• Total number of reviewers involved: 20.

3. Description of the Process of Peer Review and Editorial Oversight

Manuscripts were distributed among the reviewers, avoiding cases where a reviewer and author were from same department, or where a reviewer and author had worked together on a research paper in the past.

All reviewers were required to complete a form assessing the content and quality of the manuscript. For the content assessment, four criteria were used to evaluate the overall merit:

• Originality/novelty;
• Significance of content;
• Scientific soundness;
• Interest to the community.

The papers were rated as “High”, “Average”, or “Low” in terms of these criteria. For manuscript quality, reviewers considered the following questions:

• Does the introduction provide sufficient background and include all relevant references?
• Are all the cited references relevant to the research?
• Is the research design appropriate?
• Are the methods adequately described?
• Are the results clearly presented?
• Are the conclusions supported by the results?
• Is the paper format respected?
• Is the language satisfactory?
• Are there any obvious AI-generated passages or illustrations and, if so, are these appropriate?
• Have the authors published conceptually similar papers within the last five years, suggesting possible plagiarism?
• Are all self-citations appropriate?

Based on the overall assessment, each reviewer recommended one of the following decisions: “Accept in present form”, “Accept with minor revision”, or “Reject”. Reviewers then answered two questions for editorial oversight:

• Do you have any potential conflicts of interest with regard to this paper?
• Do you have any other ethical concerns about this study?

Reviewers also provided comments and suggestions for the authors. For manuscripts requiring minor revision, authors were given a 7-day period to submit a rebuttal and revised manuscript. The revisions were then assessed by the same reviewers, and the final reviewers’ recommendations were sent to the editor. The final editorial decision was made by the Academic Editor.

After editorial review, the papers were screened by MDPI for similarity/plagiarism concerns using iThenticate software. Inappropriate use of AI-generated passages or illustrations was also considered as part of the reviewer and editor assessment processes.