Aims, Scope and Governance

Serbian Studies is the journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies (NASSS), which is a not-for-profit cultural organization incorporated in the USA. Serbian Studies is published bi-annually by Slavica Publishers at Indiana University. It is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, publishing research articles, including original work, archival documents and book reviews related to any aspect of Serbian social and cultural history. The Editors welcome innovative approaches and new methodologies in the study of Serbian texts which offer new readings relevant to the contemporary context of global culture.  The journal has an international Editorial Board of recognized experts in the fields of Serbian literature, culture, history, politics and the arts. The governing body of Serbian Studies is the Executive of NASSS, together with the Editor-in-Chief and the Associate Editors. The President and the Treasurer of NASSS are ex officio members of the Editorial Board and attend EB meetings.

The journal is published with institutional support, namely the endowment fund of NASSS and NASSS membership fees. The journal is available to members of NASSS in hard copy and to members and the public on the NASSS website. There are no publishing fees or remuneration for authors. Recent back issues of the journal are accessible on the NASSS website while older issues are stored by the Publisher in hard copy and can be obtained on demand.


Peer Review Process

Serbian Studies is a double-blind reviewed journal.  The reviewers are external, approached on the recommendation of the EB members who are experts in the relevant fields covered by the scope of the journal. The Editor-in-Chief, in cooperation with the Editorial Board, reserves the right to have the final say on whether a submitted article will be published, guided by the overall editorial policy and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board members are obliged to flag any breaches of the adopted ethical standards.

The Editor-in-Chief and delegated members of the Editorial Board inform authors about the status of the submitted manuscript as follows: “received submitted article and sent for review”, “reviewers’ reports received and forwarded to author’, “author’s revised article received and accepted”. The reviewing process will normally take two months. In case an article is rejected, the author will receive a full report of the external reviewers or its modified version, at the discretion of the Editorial Staff.

The Editor-in-Chief, Editorial Board and External Reviewers shall have no conflict of interest with respect to the articles considered for publication. If a member of the Editorial Board feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, this member shall be excluded from the editorial process with respect to the article in question. The Editor-in-Chief, the Editorial Board members and the Reviewers will report the existence of a conflict of interest in timely fashion.

The contributions received by the Editorial Board of Serbian Studies which in the opinion of the Editor-in-Chief fulfil basic requirements regarding the content and form are further subject to double-blind review by two independent scholars. The purpose of peer review is to assist the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board in making the editorial decision as to whether to publish or not to publish a submission. Through editorial comments to the author, the review may also assist the author in improving the submission by carrying out the recommended revisions.

The choice of reviewers is at the Editors’ discretion. The reviewers must be knowledgeable about the subject area of the manuscript; they must not be from the author’s own institution and they should not have recent joint publications with any of the authors. Reviewers are not compensated for their work.

The Editor-in-Chief sends a contribution to the chosen reviewer without an author’s name, affiliation or any other data which could reveal their identity, together with a Reviewer Form adopted by the Editorial Board of Serbian Studies, which is on the NASSS website. The form asks the reviewer to declare whether the contribution should be published, with major or minor changes, or be resubmitted with major changes, or rejected. The reviewer is also invited to write a review text of between 500 and 1000 words, explaining how the augment or any other aspect of the paper could be improved, if necessary.  The identity of the author remains hidden from the reviewers before, during and after the review.

All the reviewers of a submission act independently and are not aware of each other’s identities. If the decisions of the two reviewers are not the same (accept/reject), the Editors may assign additional reviewers.

During the review process, Editors may require authors to provide additional information (including raw data) if they are necessary for the evaluation of the scholarly merit of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

The Editorial team shall ensure quality control of the reviews. With respect to reviewers whose reviews are convincingly questioned by authors, special attention will be paid to ensure that the reviews are objective and high in academic standard. When there is any doubt with regard to the objectivity of the reviewers or quality of the reviews, additional reviewers will be assigned.

The Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board members will evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

The Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board shall not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and shall not be used for personal gain.

The Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board will take all reasonable measures to ensure that the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors before, during and after the evaluation process and that the authors remain anonymous to reviewers until the end of the review process.

Copyright

Authors retain copyright of their articles and contributions published in Serbian Studies. However, once the manuscript is accepted for publication, authors shall sign an acceptance to publish form which gives the publisher certain rights.

Authors grant to the Publisher the following rights to the manuscript, including any supplementary material, and any parts, extracts or elements thereof:

  • the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript in printed form, including print-on-demand;

  • the right to produce prepublications, reprints, and special editions of the Manuscript;

  • the right to translate the Manuscript into other languages;

  • the right to reproduce the Manuscript using photomechanical or similar means including, but not limited to photocopy, and the right to distribute these reproductions;

  • the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript electronically or optically on any and all data carriers or storage media – especially in machine readable/digitalized form on data carriers such as hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray Disc (BD), Mini-Disk, data tape – and the right to reproduce and distribute the Article via these data carriers;

  • the right to store the Manuscript in databases, including online databases, and the right of transmission of the Manuscript in all technical systems and modes;

  • the right to make the Manuscript available to the public or to closed user groups on individual demand, for use on monitors or other readers (including e-books), and in printable form for the user, either via the internet, other online services, or via internal or external networks.

Self-Archiving

The self-archiving policy of Serbian Studies  allows authors to deposit the Publisher’s version in PDF in an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, or to publish it on the Author’s personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc. and/or a departmental website, at any time after publication in accordance with the Creative Commons license – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided, including the URL address of the initial publication and a link to the article’s DOI in the form of a HTML link.

Since the field of Humanities in which Serbian Studies publishes articles is largely non-commercial and does to involve patenting of products or inventions, intellectual property is not an issue likely to arise outside the scope of copyright rules.


Journal Policies on Authorship and Contributorship

By submitting a manuscript, an author agrees to abide by the Serbian Studies Editorial Policies.

An author warrants that their manuscript contains original work, has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Parallel submission of the same paper to another journal constitutes misconduct and eliminates the manuscript from consideration by Serbian Studies.

In case a submitted manuscript is a result of a research project, or its previous version has been presented at a conference in the form of an oral presentation (under the same or similar title), detailed information about the project, the conference, etc. needs to be provided in a footnote at the beginning of the text. A paper that has already been published in another journal cannot be reprinted in Serbian Studies, unless it is a translation, adaptation or reconstruction of existing research, which needs to be flagged clearly.

It is the responsibility of the author to ensure that a paper submitted to Serbian Studies is written in compliance with community ethical standards. By submitting an article, an author affirms that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and that it does not violate the rights of third parties. The Publisher, Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

An author of a contribution under review is also under an obligation to respond to additional requests of the Editorial Board of the journal in order to have the article accepted.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the content of their submissions and must ensure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the content public.

Authors wishing to include figures, tables or other illustrative material that has already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s). Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Reviewers

Reviewers are required to provide written, competent and unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the manuscript.

The reviewers assess manuscripts for compliance with the scope of the journal, relevance of the investigated topic and applied methodology, originality and scholarly relevance of information presented in the manuscript, and for presentation style and scholarly apparatus.

Reviewers should alert the Editors about any well-founded suspicions or knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been cited by authors and alert the Editors to substantial similarities between a reviewed manuscript and any manuscript published or under consideration for publication elsewhere. Reviewers should also alert the Editor to a parallel submission of the same paper to another journal, in the event that they are aware of such.

Reviewers must not have conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the funding sources for the research in the submitted paper. If such conflict exists, the reviewers must report them to the Editors without delay. Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editors without delay.

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

Procedures for Dealing with Research Misconduct, Complaints and Appeals

If the Editors are informed about suspected unethical behavior or any type of scholarly misconduct (for example, plagiarism, citation manipulation and data falsification/fabrication), accompanied with sufficient evidence, they will institute a confidential investigation process with the involvement of the Executive of NASSS or a delegated subcommittee. During an investigation, any evidence will be treated as strictly confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in investigating. The person alleged to have been involved in the misconduct will be given the chance to respond to any charges made against them.

When dealing with unethical behavior, the Editorial Staff will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): http://publicationethics.org/resources/.

Complaints against any aspect of the publication process of the journal will be handled in similar manner, by convening a subcommittee composed of a minimal Editorial Staff and the NASSS Executive.

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal Editors or publisher and cooperate with the Editors to retract or correct the error.

 Ethical Oversight, Plagiarism, Data Sharing

Ethical oversight accompanies every stage and every aspect of the author’s submission. It starts with the initial internal consideration of a submission by the Editorial Board and the Editor-in-Chief and finishes at the publication and post-publication stage, when a discussion of the published work may take a polemical turn.  Only when a submission is deemed to comply with academic standards and the editorial ethics is it sent on to the review process.  

 Plagiarism

Authors are required to cite all sources that inform their research and their submission.

Plagiarism occurs when someone appropriates another’s ideas, words, or creative expression, which is a clear violation of research ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism includes the following:

  • Word-for-word, or almost word-for-word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author’s work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);

  • Copying diagrams, visual or theoretical models, figures and statistics from someone else’s paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Information received in a private conversation or correspondence with third parties, in reviewing project applications, manuscripts and similar materials, must not be used without the express written consent of the information source.

Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected. This decision will be placed on record for future reference with respect to any new submission by the author.

In case plagiarism is retroactively discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described below under Retraction Policy.

Data Sharing 

Authors retain the right to translate their contribution into another language, to use it for non-commercial purposes in a publication which compiles their work, their doctoral dissertation or monograph study, as long as it remains stated that the new work derives from a contribution published in Serbian Studies.  Authors grant to the publisher the right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media (see more under Copyright). Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and a link must be made to the article’s DOI in the form of the HTML link, i.e. URL address of the article’s initial publication.

Third parties can use the article in a way not covered by the editorial policy and Creative Commons license – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) only if they obtain a written consent of the publisher, and such requests should be sent to the electronic address of the Editorial Board, SERBIANSTUDIES.ORG@GMAIL.COM

Retraction Policy

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or any major misconduct require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistake while preserving the integrity of the research discipline; it is not to punish the author.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Serbian Studies. The electronic version of the retraction note contains a link to the original article. In the electronic version of the original article, there is  a link to the retraction note, where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged, save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

Disclaimer

The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the Editors. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in their articles. The Publisher shall have no liability in the event of issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.