Editorial policies
Our editorial policies align with the COPE Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. Ethics statements for our journals follow COPE's guidelines supporting ethical and transparent journal management. Editorial decisions are made within the independent editorial structures of each journal, with editors solely responsible for publication decisions, ensuring the integrity, accuracy, and originality of published content.
Peer review policy
We encourage our journal editors to follow COPE guidelines and the peer review norms of their field. Submissions will be reviewed depending on their type.
Editorials / Editor's Notes: Not peer reviewed
Field reports: Editorial review
Research articles: Full peer review
Book reviews: Editorial review
Country Reports: Editorial Review
All other formats not mentioned above: Editorial Review
Papers submitted for full peer review will be reviewed by two or three anonymous reviewers (editorial board members, section editors, and/or invited reviewers with expertise in the subject matter). Authors will remain anonymous to reviewers.
The typical time taken to conduct the reviews is four weeks.
Reviewers and editors are obliged to retain the contents as privileged and confidential until publication. The editor will have final authority over an article's suitability for publication.
Advertising policy
We do not support commercial advertising within journal publications.
Statement on Publishing Ethics
Adherence to ethical standards for the dissemination of research results is critical to the research process. We encourage editors to adhere to COPE’s general approach to publication ethics for the editorial office, the Code of Conduct of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Research ethics and informed consent policy
We encourage editors to follow COPE guidelines and the research ethics and informed consent best practices in their field. All parties involved in publishing—authors, editors, peer reviewers, and publishers—must adhere to agreed-upon ethical standards.
The process for handling cases requiring corrections, retractions, and editorial expressions of concern
We expect journal editors to follow COPE guidelines and/or the retraction, correction, and statement of concern best practices in their field. Journal editors and editorial boards are responsible for creating correction, retraction, and expression of concern policies. If an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor and cooperate fully with the editor to correct the paper with a published erratum or to retract it.
Open Access Policy
We abide by the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access:
“By ‘open access’ to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”
Researchers engage in discovery for the public good, yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions imposed by other publishers, research results are not available to the full community of potential users. It is our mission to support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making research open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons CC-BY license.
Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscripts in institutional repositories or on their websites prior to and during the submission process, and to post the publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
There are no article processing charges, submissions fees, or any other costs required of authors to submit articles.
Note on Accessibility Requirements
Accessibility is a priority. Authors are asked to abide by the following recommendations, so that readers with visual impairment (e.g., blindness; color-blindness) or reading disabilities, can successfully use screen readers that provide audible content. The clear presentation of information benefits all users.
Color: When color is used to convey information, people who are blind, color blind or use a monochrome computer screen will not receive the information. Therefore, it is important not to rely on color alone to convey information. This is especially relevant to tables and graphics.
Tables: Most screen reader programs scroll down columns and read from the top of the table to the bottom. They then progress to the top of the next column. Please organize your tables accordingly, and keep tables as simple as possible, because people with screen enlargers will view only part of the table at a time. To adhere to web accessibility guidelines for HTML documents, you will also want to include an explicit:
Descriptions of Graphics and Photos: Present the contents of all graphics and photos in clear text, so that all readers can perceive the content. For example:
The author must attest that permissions are available for all recognizable persons in a photograph.
