We are aware that these works are often performed by doctoral students and young researchers who need peer-reviewed publications in order to have a chance when evaluated by hiring committees, but this aspect must not affect the selection of articles published in our journal. Other communities - such as the experimental high-energy particle physicists with their huge collaborations and long preparatory time before first scientific results are obtained - face similar problems and found ways to solve them; the journals cannot play this role.

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We mention here the most frequent style errors, in the hope that they will occur less frequently in the future: units should be in roman; subscripts denoting abbreviations should be in roman; variables should appear in italics, i.e., in math mode. Minus signs should be real minus signs, i.e., they must be placed between dollar signs. Table captions should be above a table, not below. In the references, the first 3 authors of papers with more than 5 authors should be mentioned, followed by `et al.'; and not `et al.' already after the first author.

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... lists

We do, however, keep a master list of referees that will soon include how often they have been called by A&A Editors in the recent past.

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... referees

Referees are understandably sensitive to this, and failure to take their advice into account may impact on their future willingness to act in this role.

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... journals

We feel that the referee should be selected from the same pool of people likely to read articles published in the journal.

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... list

In a very few cases, the authors themselves were unable to identify such an independent competent person within the astronomical community!

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... cases

The occasional problem cases will be discussed in Sect. 4.3.

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... referee

The Letters Office does not currently use the MMS system, but handles manuscripts with a stand-alone computer. This has the consequence that the Editor-in-Chief cannot access the Letters database, and vice versa. One advantage of this situation is that regular papers co-authored by the Editor-in-Chief can be handled by the Letters Office, and Letters co-authored by the Letters Editor are handled by the Main Journal Office, with the referees preserving anonymity.

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... authors

Or guessed by these Editors before taking up their duty.

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... UK

By virtue of a long-standing, tacit reciprocity agreement motivated by the fact that everyone can publish for free in MNRAS.

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