Editorial Procedures and Peer-Review

Initial Checks

All submitted manuscripts received by the editorial office will be checked by a professional in-house managing editor to determine whether they are properly prepared and whether they follow the ethical policies of the journal. Manuscripts that do not fit the journal's publishing scope, ethical policy or basic standards will be rejected before peer-review. Manuscripts that are not properly prepared will be returned to authors for revision and resubmission. 

Peer-Review

Once a manuscript passes the initial checks, it will be assigned to at least two independent experts for peer-review. A double-blind review is applied, where authors' identities are not known to reviewers and reviewers identities are not known to authors. 

In the case of regular submissions, in-house assistant editors will select review experts from our reviewer list or from recommendations by an academic editor. These experts may also include editorial board members of the journal. Reviewers should not have published with any of the authors during the past five years and should not currently work or collaborate with any of the institutions of the authors of the submitted manuscript.

The review will be completed in 2-3 weeks.

Editorial Decision and Revision

The in-house editors will notify the authors of the review result, which will be one of the following:

Accept after Minor Revisions:

The paper will be accepted after revision against the reviewer’s comments. Authors are given 7 days for minor revisions.

Reconsider after Major Revisions:

The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the quality of revision. Authors need to provide a point-by-point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. Usually, only one round of major revisions is allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within a suitable time frame, and the revised version will be returned to the reviewers for further comments.

Reject and Encourage Resubmission:

If additional experiments or data are needed to support the conclusions, the manuscript will be rejected and authors will be encouraged to re-submit the paper once supplementary research have been completed.

Reject:

The article has serious flaws, and/or makes no original significant contribution. No offer of resubmission to the journal is provided.

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

Editors Submission

The editorial staff / editors / editorial board members should not be involved in publishing decisions on papers which they have written themselves or have been written by their family members or colleagues. Any such submission should be strictly subject to the journal’s usual editorial process. Peer review should be handled independently from the relevant author/editor and their research groups.

Appeal

The authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment of the reviewers. The authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to cmce@sandermanpub.com. Detailed reasons for appealing must be stated, including a comprehensive and reasonable answer to the reviewers’ comment. The editorial department will consider whether to change the decision case by case.

Correction and Retraction

General Situation

Articles published online or in print are considered the final and complete version. In principle, the journal does not make corrections or retractions on published articles. However, in case of the situations described below, corrections or retractions may be carried out if truly necessary.

Correction

If there appears to be an unintended scientific mistake in the article which would not lead to significant impacts on the results and conclusion, the editorial office will publish corrections in the journal as soon as possible, detailing the changes made to the original article and indicating the source of the article. The journal will release the corrected new version of the article, and specify the changes to the original article and the date of update. In addition, the superseded version will also be archived. Readers can obtain it directly, but only the latest version of the article should be used for citation.

Retraction

In the following cases, the editorial office would retract published articles and issue retraction statements: a. If an article is found to have severe scientific errors making the results and conclusion of the article unreliable; b. For article suspected of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and data falsification, the editorial office will initiate an investigation and issue a statement to inform readers of the risks associated with the article. Once the investigation is completed, the result will be made public. If the academic misconduct is confirmed, the article will be immediately retracted and a retraction statement will be issued by the editorial office.

Article-processing charges

Authors should pay an Article-processing charges (APC) after the paper is accepted. 

For the paper submitted to all journals of Sanderman Publishing House,  the APC is shown in the table below.

For more details, please contact with the editor directly via the email cmce@sandermanpub.com once the manuscript is accepted.