Policies
How we publish, in full.
Written to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, which COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME maintain jointly. Each policy now has its own page; the complaints route is linked below.
- Peer review — Single-anonymised review at every journal: rationale, safeguards, process and timelines, reviewer conduct, decisions and appeals.
- Open access and copyright — Immediate open access under CC BY 4.0; authors retain copyright; self-archiving without embargo.
- Editorial structure and governance — Roles and terms, editorial independence, editors' own submissions, appointments and accountability.
- Fees and waivers — A single USD 300 APC on acceptance, waivers on need, and the separation of payment from decisions.
- Publishing ethics — Authorship, originality, data and image integrity, human and animal research, AI use — including corrections and retractions.
- Publication malpractice statement — The duties of every party, the forms malpractice takes, and how it is enforced.
- Archiving and preservation — Portico preservation, Crossref DOIs, and immediate self-archiving of all versions.
- Publication transparency — What every article and journal disclose, ownership and revenue, and the discipline governing claims.
- Privacy — What we hold about authors, reviewers and readers, where it is stored, and for how long.
- Complaints and appeals — How to appeal a decision, and how to complain about a journal, an editor, or the publisher.
Each policy carries the date it was last updated, and the policy in force on the date of submission is the one that governs a manuscript. These policies apply uniformly to every journal Scientara publishes, with one exception: VERSIONICS publishes its own policies on its journal site.