Paper reviewing

Description of the peer review process

Upon submission, each paper is examined by the secretary of the editorial board on meeting the formal requirements: length, structure, basic formatting, plagiarism etc. Then, the paper is analyzed by the Editor or the editorial team of the Journal. At this stage, we decide if the paper fits the scope of the Journal. The editorial team pays attention to the academic value of the paper, its relevance, novelty and validity of the results and conclusions.

As our editors are the members of The Council of Science Editors, in terms of Authorship and Authorship Responsibilities we use in our activity recommendations of the council. All authors who submit their papers to our journals should take this into account.

Editors of our journal address respect to the ethical standards in Editing introduced and approved by the Committee on Publication Ethics because the journal is a member of, and subscribes to the principles of, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Editors of our journal refer to a short guide to the Ethical Editing for Editors. Editors of our journals undertake Editor Role and Responsibilities as an integral part of CSE’s White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications introduced and promoted by The Council of Science Editors.

If the paper does not meet the abovementioned requirements or fails to fit the scope of the Journal, the editorial team may reject the paper without sending it for peer review. In that case, we inform the author about our decision in a timely manner, indicating the weak points of the paper and suggesting alternative platforms, if possible. Other cases for desk rejection may include typos, grammatical errors and poor punctuation; unclear writing; inconsistency and inaccuracy; unclear impact or novelty; the paper is currently under review at another journal; the paper lacks key elements such as the title, authors, affiliations, keywords, main part, references, some tables and figures; language is not sufficient; figures and tables are not clear enough to read; references are very old etc.

In case the paper satisfies all the requirements and standards, the Editor arranges it for peer review. The author receives confirmation that the paper is forwarded for peer review and gets to know the expected dates of the review. The standard peer review period of our Journal lasts 8-9 weeks (from the date when the paper reviewing begins to the final decision of the Editor about the paper acceptance or rejection). We believe that this is an optimal time frame for the reviewers to make a valid and substantial judgment on the paper and provide a proper review report. We have an extensive editorial board and a great team of external reviewers - experts in the field. Thus, our reviewers are not overwhelmed with tasks and have sufficient time to devote undivided attention to the paper in hand. The Editor selects reviewers with expertise in the field of the paper. Our peer review is "double blind peer reviewing", meaning that neither reviewers nor authors do not know the identity of each other. This helps us to exclude the conflict of interests and avoid any possible bias linked with the peer review process. Reviewers of our journal follow COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

Reviewers are asked to provide their judgment on the quality and value of the paper, its structure, logic, and clarity of the text. The review report highlights strong and weak points of the paper and provides recommendations on improvements or adjustments to the requirements of academic publishing and the standards of the Journal.

Based on the review reports, the Editor-in-Chief makes a decision about acceptance the paper (with or without revision) or its rejection.

If the paper is accepted for publishing and the decision of the Editor-in-Chief is positive, the Editor-in-Chief advises the author of the accepted paper to choose publication under subscription-based option (free of charge for the authors but the paper will be available for sale for the readers and for the subscribers) or immediate Open Access option. If the author chooses Open Access option he/she will be asked to pay article processing charge (see the APC policy page) that will cover article processing costs.