Review policy

All contributions pass the following peer review procedure.

• The Editorial Board Secretary reviews the manuscript for improper borrowings / presentation and anonymizes the text, where necessary. A receipt confirmation is sent to the contributor.
• The manuscript is sent out to the Editorial Board to be discussed at its monthly session. The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject without review texts that fall outside the Journal’s research scope or fail to meet the minimum requirements for academic writing (a motivated rejection note is sent to the author in this case).
• The Editorial Board appoints one or several reviewers specializing in the relevant domain. To avoid a conflict of interests, the reviewers are selected from institutions other than the author’s institution and among researchers who have not worked co-authored papers with the author or with him / her for at least five years.
• The reviewer(s) are sent proposals for a review that cite the paper’s title and indicate the term set for preparing a review.
• The manuscript is sent to reviewers accepting the proposal for a double-blind peer review where neither the author, nor the reviewer knows the other’s name. Reviews, written in free format, consider the contribution for academic merits, originality, reliability of analysis, consistency of reasoning, use of up-to-date literature, proper handling (including quoting) of sources, and clarity of style. The reviewers abide by the ethics. The holding period for reviews is three years.
• The Editorial Board uses the review(s) to make its decision on accepting the contribution for publication, or sending it back for further elaboration and repeated peer review, or rejecting it altogether. The Editorial Board’s decision is sent to the contributor together with the review(s). The total procedure, including the reception of the contribution and its acceptance/rejection with the corresponding notification sent to the contributor, takes normally four to five months or, in exceptional cases, longer.
• As a rule, the successful contributor is expected to fine-tune or rework the contribution following the reviewer’s remarks, if any, within one to three months. Where the remarks are significant, the contribution may need a second review.
• The Editorial Board considers the acceptability of the reworked contribution for publication.
• If accepted, the paper undergoes compulsory academic and technical editing and is published within one year of the receipt of its corrected version.