Peer Review Policy and Procedure
1. General Information
The following types of contributions are peer-reviewed: Articles, Reports (brief communications, including reports of expeditions), Materials. For these contributions the journal uses double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.
Other contributions (like conference reports or obituaries) are not usually peer-reviewed, although they are evaluated by the editors.
Questions about a specific manuscript should be directed to the managing editor.
2. Criteria for Publication
The journal asks the reviewers to check, while evaluating a manuscript, the correspondance of the article to the following criteria:
- complience with the journal's scope
- theoretical and methodological consistency
- data sufficiency and sources reliability
- analytical accuracy
No preference is given to any particular linguistic area, type of proper names or specific problem.
3. The Review Process
After receiving the manuscript the editor verifies its compliance with the general requirements (correspondance to the journal's scope, correctness of formatting, quality of illustration, etc.). At this stage, the manuscript may be returned to the author with queries or requests to provide missing information. It is than the editorial assistant's duty to anonymyze the paper which means to remove names and affiliations of the authors, references to funding sources, acknowledgments, and all other indications of authorship within the manuscript. Once anonymyzed, the paper is assigned for peer review. The editor-in-chief or deputy editors evaluate the manuscript and send it out for peer review. Only those papers that seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent for formal review. Those papers judged by the editors to be inappropriate are rejected without review.
Every submitted article is evaluated by at least two members of the journal's advisory board and, if needed, by other reviewers (members of the journal's reviewers committee and external experts) with relevant experience and expertise. The review process should meet the requirements of the Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement.
The reviewing may take up to three months. When the required number of reviews is received, the editors consider the experts’ opinions and make an initial decision to accept, reject, or request a revision. The editors’ response with their decision and a list of any changes needed for the article to be accepted for publication is then sent to the author.
If the article is not accepted for publication, the editors generally explain the reasons for that. However, the full texts of reviews the editors receive from reviewers are never disclosed to authors. If the manuscript is rejected at any stage of the process, the author is free to submit it to another journal.
If the decision is for revision, the author must respond to the comments made by the reviewers and/or Editor, and resubmit. Usually the revised manuscript will be re-evaluated by the original handling editor and/or reviewer.
