Peer-review & plagiarism policies

Peer-review policy

Initial evaluation

The editor-in-chief or co-editor-in-chief performs an initial technical/editorial screening of the submission, which results in one of the following decisions: 

• If a submission does not adhere to the submission guidelines, or if it is lacking information that limits judgment of the validity or suitability of the work for consideration, it will be returned to the author(s) for correction (re-submission).
• If a submission is judged not to be "of broad interest and significance" or not likely to be ultimately publishable in the journal will also be returned to authors (declined/rejected) without further processing,  as part of our endeavor to provide a rapid feedback to authors and saving valuable time. 
• If a submission is deemed a suitable work for the journal, the editor will initiate a double-blind peer-review process. 

Initial evaluation takes no more than a week from the submission date. 

Double-blind peer-review 

In this journal, the editors ensure that a  double-blind peer-review of a submission is performed past initial evaluation.

• A submission must be thoroughly reviewed by at least two external reviewers, who are experts in the field.
• The peer-reviewers are assigned by the editor-in-chief or an associate editor. 
• The peer-reviewers are required to file their competing interests regarding the submission they are invited to review.
• Based on the comments of the reviewers on the submission, the editor-in-chief will send a decision letter to the author(s), which will be one of the following: rejected; resubmit (revisions required); accepted.
• The revised submissions are also sent for peer-review, usually conducted by the same reviewers on another round.  Minor revisions are evaluated by the editors.

The peer-review process may take 4 to 6 weeks to complete. We ask our reviewers to send their comments in a timely manner so that we can handle submissions appropriately. 

Language editing 

Submissions that are accepted for publication by the editor-in-chief are sent to the language editor, who works with the author(s) to polish their paper. 

This stage usually takes between 1 to 2 weeks, based on the volume of the editing required, and the time it takes for the author(s) to review their edited paper. 

Plagiarism policy

The  submissions are strictly screened for plagiarism using Crossref Similarity Check Powered by iThenicate.

• The journal will follow the guidelines of COPE to handle cases of plagiarism.
• Minor instances of text similarity identified during review process may be returned to authors for corrections. 
• Major plagiarism identified during the review of the submission will result in rejecting the submission. In addition, other actions per COPE guidelines may be taken to observe the high ethical standards of scholarly publishing. 
• Plagiarism identified post-publication will also be handled following COPE guidelines, resulting in events such as publication of a correction or retraction of the paper.