EDITORIAL POLICY

EDITORIAL MANUSCRIPT HANDLING

Every manuscript submitted to the JEPM journal undergoes a double-blind peer review, irrespective of paper type (except Editorials), ensuring the anonymity of both the reviewers and the authors. The peer review process involves initial in-house checks for quality and evaluation of scope and relevance by the Editor-in-Chief, depending on the scope/nature of the content. Subsequently, the papers are sent to Editorial Board members for review coordination. The Editor-in-Chief gathers external peer review reports, requests author revisions, and, if necessary, conducts additional peer reviews before making the ultimate decision on publication or rejection. Further details about the process are provided below.

All submitted manuscripts should be complete in themselves and adequately supported by experimental detail. Members of the Editorial Board and other appropriate experts will peer review the papers. Editors handling papers will independently make decisions on acceptance, revision, resubmission or rejection based on the referees’ reports.

JEPM aims for peer review to be completed within 100 days of submission and work with Section Editors to ensure that peer review is robust whilst maintaining goals for fast turnaround times and decisions.

Editorial Process - Roles and responsibilities

The Editor in Chief is responsible for the scope of the journal and representing the title at relevant conferences and meetings. The Editor in Chief is responsible for deciding which manuscripts submitted to the JEPM will be published. The Editor is guided by the policies of the journal's Editorial Board and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Section Editors are responsible for their individual sections within the journal, ensuring all submissions are within the scope of the journal. They can return manuscripts to authors if unsuitable, but will primarily hand in-scope submissions to Editorial Board members.

Editorial Board members are responsible for managing the peer review process. They work with peer reviewers to obtain independent assessments of the manuscript and make decisions on whether the work is suitable for publication. Revised manuscripts are sent back to the original Editorial Board member for reassessment.

Editors must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the manuscripts they consider for publication. If an Editor feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the manuscripts shall be made by the Editorial Board. Editors have a responsibility to protect the anonymity of reviewers as per the highest academic standards.

Editors shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor’s own research without the express written consent of the author.

EDITORIAL PROCESSES

After the submission of a manuscript, it undergoes preliminary quality assessments within our internal editorial office to verify its adherence to the journal's ethical and publishing guidelines. This includes scrutiny of relevant metadata, author affiliations, and reference lists, and revision can be requested. During the editorial pre-check phase, the editor will assess the suitability of the submission with respect to the scope of the journal, as well as the overall scientific soundness of the manuscript, including the relevance of the references and the correctness of the applied methodology. An editor can decide to reject the manuscript, request revisions before peer review, or continue with the peer-review process and recommend suitable reviewers. The average time from submission to first decision is 2-3 weeks. If a paper is not acceptable for peer review in its present form, we will pass on suggestions for revisions to the author.

If articles successfully pass this initial evaluation and fall within the journal's scope, they are examined for plagiarism using iThenticate. The generated reports are then forwarded to the Editor overseeing the submission, aiding them in their assessment of the manuscript.

Peer Review Process

Manuscripts that are not instantly rejected are sent out for peer review, usually to two independent reviewers without disclosing the identities of the authors or other reviewers (Double-blind peer review). The review results are confidentially delivered to the Editor, who then reviews the reviewer feedback to ensure the comments are relevant and non-discriminatory before sending the comments back to the authors. Based on the feedback from these reviewers and the Editors’ judgment a decision is given on the manuscript.

Nominated Reviewers

At the time of submission, the authors can suggest or oppose reviewers for their manuscript. Authors are encouraged to suggest up to three persons competent to review their manuscript. When suggesting reviewers for manuscripts, Nominated Reviewers should have no close affiliation with the authors and should give an objective review of the manuscript. Reviewers should not have published with any of the co-authors during the past three years and should not currently work or collaborate with any of the institutions of the co-authors of the submitted manuscript.

Professional e-mail addresses must be provided, if available, rather than private e-mail addresses. The Editors retain the right to use their discretion to select reviewers they deem appropriate, which may or may not include those suggested by authors. The final choice of referees will remain entirely with the Editor. If authors would prefer a specific person not to be a reviewer, this should be announced.

Editorial Decision and Revision

All the articles, reviews and communications published in the JEPM journal go through the peer-review process and receive at least two reviews, the submission editor, will make one of the following decisions:

• Accept:
  If the submission is accepted, it will go through production processes in order to be published in the journal.
• Minor Revisions:
  The submission is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments. Authors must implement minor revisions.
• Major Revisions:
  The acceptance of the submission would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. 
• Reject:
  The submission has serious flaws, and/or makes no original significant contribution. No offer for resubmission to the journal is provided.

Revised Manuscripts

Manuscripts may be returned to authors for modification of the scientific content and/or for shortening and language corrections. A submission that receives a revised decision also receives the reviewer's reports often with Editorial recommendations on how to improve the work so it can be reconsidered at the journal.

All reviewer comments should be responded to in a point-by-point fashion. Where the authors disagree with a reviewer, they must provide a clear response

If a paper that is returned to the authors for amendment is not returned to the Editor in the revised form within one month after a Minor revision and two months after a Major revision, the paper will be regarded as withdrawn, unless a request for extension is made to the Editor dealing with the paper. Any revised version received after this deadline will be treated as a new, resubmitted manuscript.

Revised manuscripts are returned to an Editor, who, in the case of major revisions, resends the revised paper to the reviewers or, in the case of minor revisions, assesses the authors' corrections. The feedback from the second round of reviews follows the described review process. A maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript is normally provided. In exceptional instances, authors may be granted a second opportunity to revise their papers if they are deemed unacceptable even after the initial minor revision. In any case, an Editor has the authority to reject the manuscript if the suggested corrections are not incorporated.

Resubmitted Manuscripts

If an extensive revision is required, including a requirement for additional experimental work or analysis, the manuscript may be rejected but with a recommendation to resubmit a substantially revised manuscript. A resubmitted manuscript should be submitted as a new manuscript but should include a letter outlining the revisions that have been made in response to the major criticisms of the original article. The article will be treated as a new submission, it will typically be edited by the Editor who dealt with the original manuscript but may not necessarily be reviewed by the same referees.

Accepted Manuscripts

If the Editor recommends an accepted decision, the paper moves forward to copyediting, proofreading and typesetting before publication. All authors of the paper are notified of acceptance.

Appeal Process for Editorial Decisions

The Editor-in-Chief or Editors will reject papers, with an immediate decision, that are outside the scope of the journal, lack significance or which they believe do not meet the required standards for other reasons. Authors who feel that there are substantial grounds for disagreement with an Editor’s decision should contact the Editor-in-Chief, whose decision will be final. Authors who wish to withdraw their manuscript (at any stage of the process) should contact the Editorial office.

Authors have the option to contest a rejection by emailing the Editorial Office of the journal. The appeal must include a comprehensive justification, addressing the reviewers' and/or Editor's comments point by point. Appeals are permissible only in cases where a "reject" decision has been made and must be submitted within three months from the decision date. Non-compliance with these stipulations will lead to the appeal not being further considered.

PAPERS SUBMITTED TO JEPM MUST REPRESENT ORIGINAL WORK

JEPM does not accept previously published articles (in whole or in part). This refers to peer-reviewed content and does not include articles hosted on preprint servers (arXiv, bioRxiv, chemRxiv, etc.) published as a thesis, or presented at conferences. The authors are requested to note the use of the thesis or conference material in the Acknowledgments section and cite it properly.

Duplicate submissions

Duplicate submissions are not permitted to the JEPM journal. If an author has submitted the same paper to multiple journals at different publishers, submissions to the other publishers should be withdrawn. Authors who continue to submit manuscripts to multiple journals may receive sanctions on future submissions.

PUBLICATION ETHICS AND MALPRACTICE

All parties: author, journal editor, peer reviewer and publisher should observe high standards with respect to publication ethics as set out by the Commission on Publication Ethics (COPE). Falsification or fabrication of data, plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors’ own work without proper citation, and misappropriation of the work are all unacceptable practices. Any cases of ethical misconduct are treated very seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines.

Plagiarism

By submitting your manuscript to the journal it is understood that this it is an original manuscript and is unpublished work and is not under consideration elsewhere. Re-use of text, data, figures, or images without appropriate acknowledgment or permission is considered plagiarism, as is the paraphrasing of text, concepts, and ideas. All allegations of plagiarism are investigated thoroughly and in accordance with COPE guidelines detailed here.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism. All submitted papers will be checked by iThenticate Plagiarism Detection Software (from 1st of April 2018).

Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected and authors will be permanently or temporarily forbidden to publish in the journal.

Copyright

Submission of a manuscript implies that the work described has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, or thesis) and that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

In order to reproduce any third-party material, including tables, figures, or images, in an article authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder and be compliant with any requirements the copyright holder may have pertaining to this reuse.

Evidence in writing that such permissions have been secured from the rights-holder must be made available to the Editors. It is also the author's responsibility to include acknowledgments as stipulated by the particular institutions.

It is particularly important to clear permission for use in both the print and online versions of the journal, and we are not able to accept permissions that carry a time limit because we retain journal articles as part of our online journal archive.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

JEPM Editorial Board requires a declaration of any conflict of interest upon submission online. If the manuscript is published, conflict of interest information will be communicated in a statement in the published paper.

WITHDRAWAL AND RETRACTION POLICY

Standards for dealing with withdrawals or retractions of published papers have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for paper withdrawal or retraction by JEPM.

In the electronic version of the original paper, a link is made to the withdrawal (retraction) note where it is clearly stated that the paper has been withdrawn (retracted). The original paper is retained unchanged; save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is "withdrawn" or “retracted.”

MATERIAL DISCLAIMER

The opinions expressed in JEPM are those of the authors and contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Editors, the Editorial Board, the Faculty of Technology Zvornik, the University of East Sarajevo, or the organization to which the authors are affiliated.

The Editor assumes no responsibility whatsoever, direct or implied, for the contents of the papers as well as for the consequences arising from misinterpretation or unawareness of the requirements for publication or any damages suffered by co-authors from actions or inactions of their corresponding author.

Becoming an Editor

Academics who are interested in becoming Editorial Board members should contact the editorial office at jepm@tfzv.ues.rs.ba