FPA TECHNICAL PAPER PEER REVIEW PROCEDURE

The following procedure is required to be followed in order for a committee within the Foundation Performance Association to have a technical document sanctioned by and/or published by the FPA. This applies both to new documents or documents that are being updated in order to keep them current with changes in the industry.

1. When an FPA-sanctioned committee has completed its compilation of the document in accordance with the committee's own rules, the committee shall circulate the document to every FPA member that is current in their dues at the time of this circulation.

2. When circulated, the document shall include the name of the association and the committee. Further, it shall be circulated with a document number of the form "FPA-XX-xx-Rev" where:

"XX" is a unique two-letter code (in caps) chosen by the committee to represent all documents by that committee,

"xx" is a unique document number inside the committee, beginning with "01",

"Rev" is a letter revision number such as "D" or "E" for new documents or a combination number/letter revision such as "1A" or "1B" for updated documents, where the number portion is the last published revision number.

3. The document shall be circulated by the chair of the committee or its subcommittee with instructions for the FPA members to respond within 45 days (or longer if the committee allows such) and to respond with written specific comments (i.e., "strike that, add this") or with a written explanation of why a major portion of the document shall be re-written or omitted. These comments shall be retained by the members of the committee or its subcommittee for future reference if necessary.

4. After completion of the specified circulation period, the committee shall incorporate the properly submitted FPA comments if agreeable within the committee or its subcommittee.

5. Upon completion of the above, the chair of the committee or its subcommittee shall circulate the final document to each FPA member that previously submitted comments of any type, requesting their final approval within 15 days. An incremented "Rev" letter (for new documents) or "Rev" number/letter (for previously published documents) shall be assigned to the revised document at this time. This step may be omitted if there were no FPA comments or if the FPA comments were minor and those comments were incorporated verbatim.

6. Step 5 may be repeated if necessary to gain final approval except that the circulation period may be reduced to 5 days for each subsequent issue. At the committee chair's option, any unresolved dispute may be taken to the FPA Board of Directors for final approval.

7. Upon successful completion of the above steps, the document is sanctioned by the association and the committee or its subcommittee is then allowed to publish the document on the FPA website or any other way it chooses, provided the requirements of the following steps 8-10 are also followed.

8. For documents being published for the first time, they shall be published using the same document number chosen in Step 2 except that the "Rev" letter shall become the number zero (0). Future published revisions of the document by the committee shall include incremental and consecutive "Rev" numbers such as "1" or "2".

9. When published, an issue history shall be included near the front of the document detailing those issues circulated outside the committee. In addition, the name of the association and the committee shall be clearly shown on the document.

10. All written comments received during the peer review process shall be retained by the members of the committee or its subcommittee for future reference by the association if necessary.