Peer Review Policy
The practice of peer review is intended to ensure that valuable scientific material is published. The peer review process depends to a large extent on the trust and willing participation of the scholarly community and requires that everyone involved behaves responsibly and ethically. Journals have an obligation to provide transparent policies for peer review, and reviewers have an obligation to conduct reviews in an ethical and accountable manner. Our Journal adopts this policy from COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). Clear communication between the journal and the reviewers is essential to facilitate consistent, fair, and timely review. It is hoped they will provide helpful guidance to researchers, and be a reference for editors and publishers in guiding their reviewers. Our Peer reviewers play a central and critical part in maintaining the high standard of the FCS Journal, which is why all incoming manuscripts are peer-reviewed following the procedure outlined below.
Initial Manuscript Evaluation:
In 1st step, Chief Editor first evaluates all the submitted manuscripts. Manuscripts rejected at this stage are insufficiently original, have serious scientific flaws, have poor grammar or English language, or are outside the aims and scope of the journal. Those that meet the minimum criteria are normally passed on to at least two expert referees for review.
Type of Peer Review:
FCS Journal peer review policy employs ‘double blind’ reviewing, both the Referee and the Author remain anonymous throughout the “double-blind” review process.
Referee Selection:
Referees are selected according to their expertise in their particular fieldwork. Submitted papers are reviewed by at least two independent referees and by our editorial staff. Authors are entitled to expect that Referees or other individuals privy to the work an Author submits to a journal will not steal their research ideas or plagiarize their work. Further, Referees hold the responsibility to be objective in their judgments; have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, with respect to the authors and/or with respect to the research funders; point out relevant published work which is not yet cited by the author(s); and treat the reviewed articles confidentially.
Referee Reports:
Referees are requested to evaluate whether the manuscript has already been published in another journal, is methodologically sound, contains results that are clearly presented and support the conclusions, follows appropriate ethical guidelines, especially as concerns plagiarism, contains an appropriate bibliography, and makes a significant contribution to the sciences. Referees judge each paper based on the following scale: Accepted with no revision; Accepted with partial revision; Accepted with major revision; Flat rejection. A decision is sent to the corresponding Author, along with recommendations made by the Referees. The Editors are responsible for the final decision to accept/reject the manuscript.
In the final round, the handling Editor will check matters of linguistic and stylistic correctness and may suggest or apply corrections at this point. In rare cases, the manuscript may be returned to the author(s) for a full linguistic and stylistic revision.
Reviews of other materials such as preprints, grants, books, conference proceeding submissions, registered reports (preregistered protocols), or data will have a similar underlying ethical framework, but the process will vary depending on the source material and the type of review requested.
