Peer Review Procedure Rules

Rules for the Peer Review Procedure of the Historia Aperta Journal

Texts sent to the editorial office are not returned to the authors, not even in the case of the denial to print the text according to the decision of the editorial board. The editorial board of the Historia Aperta (HA) Journal handles the authors´ personal data in compliance with the Personal Data Protection Law of the Czech Republic.

1) The author submits the text to the editorial office of HA according to the instructions for authors. The dates for the acceptance of scientific texts by the editorial office of HA are the following:       
     - 15th February of each year – the deadline for the acceptance of texts for the first issue of the given year,                
     - 1st September of each year – the deadline for the acceptance of texts for the second issue of the given year.

2) The editorial office will inform the author about the time schedule and the process of the peer review procedure. The peer review procedure is anonymous (double-blind peer-review).

3) On the basis of the editorial staff´s proposals, two independent reviewers are selected and approached for each submitted text of the study. The selection criteria are especially the reviewers´ expertise and scientific specialization. After an agreement, each reviewer elaborates one assessment of the received text. The forms for creating expert assessments have an identical structure and evaluation criteria.

4) The editorial staff will inform the editorial board about the characteristics of the study as well as relevant expert reviews.

5) During a regular meeting, the editorial board will select texts to be published. As a selection criterion, the submitted expert review assessments will be used. The editorial board further considers the thematic focus of each issue and the appropriate composition of articles and studies within the respective issue.

6) The authors will be immediately notified of the result of the editorial board vote as well as of a potential proposal for fine-tuning the submitted texts according to the suggestions in the review assessments. The authors will be provided with the review assessments (in an anonymous form) for consultation.

7) In order to conduct editorial work between the individual meetings of the editorial board, a permanent editorial department is constituted for the journal. The activity of its editors will be controlled by the editorial board.

The result of the peer review procedure has four possible outputs:

  1. the submitted text is approved for printing by the editorial board on the basis of the peer review procedure,
  2. the submitted text is not approved for printing by the editorial board on the basis of the peer review procedure, the author/authors of the respective text is/are recommended to revise the text (according to the reviewers´ suggestions) and to submit it in the next round of the peer review procedure for new assessment,
  3. the submitted text is accepted for printing, but it is not approved by the editorial board to be integrated into the currently prepared issue due to a different thematic focus of the prepared issue or topics of the constituent studies. In such a case, the author/authors will be offered a possibility of printing the text in the next convenient issue.
  4. the submitted text is not approved for printing by the editorial board on the basis of the peer review procedure for its insufficient form.

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