Statement of Peer Review ^†

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

• Type of peer review: single-blind.
• Conference submission management system: A total of 54 abstracts were submitted for the conference, and 27 papers were published in Engineering Proceedings (https://sciforum.net/dashboard/event_chair/submissions/HMAM2).

All of the submissions were processed completely online using MDPI’s SciForum platform. This includes the submission of abstracts, presentation files, and manuscripts; a preliminary check of the format and template by event organizers; an initial peer review of the submissions by event chairs; a full peer review by external international reviewers; the submission of revised version by the authors; and the final check and acceptance by the reviewers and event chairs. Further checks for compliance to MDPI standards involving plagiarism were carried out by the editors of the Engineering Proceedings journal of MDPI.

Number of submissions sent for review: 35;

Number of submissions accepted: 27;

Acceptance rate (number of submissions accepted/number of submissions received): 0.77;

Average number of reviews per paper: 2;

Total number of reviewers involved: 24 reviewers.

Here is some additional information on the review process:

• 1. Participants received the results of the review. Types of decisions: reject, resubmit, revision, and acceptance:

• Reject: Following peer review, the paper was judged not acceptable for the Holography Meets Advanced Manufacturing (HMAM2) conference;
• Resubmit: The submitted version of the paper was not acceptable and required major revisions, but there was clear potential in the paper, and HMAM2 was prepared to consider a new version. Authors were offered an opportunity to revise their manuscripts and resubmit as a new submission. The previous reviewer comments and editorial recommendations were applied, and then in the next round the editors and reviewers were convinced by the authors’ responses and revisions that their paper fit the standards of HMAM2.
• Revision: The paper required changes before a final decision could be made. Authors were suggested to revise their manuscripts in light of comments received from reviewers and editors, and advised to submit a revised version with suitable responses to reviewer comments for consideration. Revisions underwent a further peer review process in some cases, and in some other cases, the submissions underwent another round of revision.
• Final Acceptance: The paper was found acceptable for publication when all of the required standards of HMAM2 were met. Some time before final acceptance, sub-editing changes and minor amendments were suggested to ensure the paper fully matched our criteria. After final checking by the Editorial Office, acceptance was confirmed, and the paper was forwarded to the publishers for publication.

• 2. The accepted and presented submissions were published in MDPI’s Engineering Proceedings. Selected submissions were invited to the Special Issue on “Research in Computational Optics”, which was organized by Prof. Vijayakumar Anand, Prof. Ravi Kumar, Dr. Andra Naresh Kumar Reddy, and Dr. Vinoth Balasubramani and was published in MDPI’s Photonics (IF—2.536) via APC waivers and special discounts (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/photonics/special_issues/B3GWFOP55V). In the Special Issue, three extended versions of the conference submissions have already been published.