Editor Policy

Obligations of the Editorial Office, Authors and Reviewers

Peer Reviewers

The reviewers are selected solely according to whether they have the relevant expertise for evaluating a manuscript. Bankarstvo uses the double-blind review system for all papers. Each manuscript is reviewed by at least two reviewers. The reviewers act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities. The author does not know who the reviewers are and vice versa.

The purpose of peer review is to assists the Editorial Office in making the decision on whether to accept or reject a paper. The purpose is also to assist the author in improving the quality of the papers.

Peer Review Process

Manuscripts are sent for review only if they pass the initial Editor’s evaluation in terms of their form and thematic scope, establishing whether they are suitable for publication in the journal.

Under normal circumstances, the review process takes up to 30 days. The total period from the submission of a manuscript until its publication lasts from 90 to 120 days.

During the review process the Editor may require the authors to provide additional information (including the primary data) if they are necessary for the evaluation of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential by the Editor and the reviewers, and must not be used for any other purposes.

The entire review process takes place under the supervision of the Editor.

Resolving Inconsistences

In the case that the authors have serious and reasonable objections to the reviews, the Editorial Office makes an assessment of whether the concerned review is objective and whether it meets the academic standards. If there is a doubt about the objectivity or quality of the review, the Editor will assign additional reviewers.

Additional reviewers may also be assigned when the reviewers’ decisions (accept or reject) are contrary to each other or otherwise substantially incompatible.

The final decision on the acceptance of the manuscript for publication rests solely with the Editor-in-Chief.

Authors' Responsibilities

Authors warrant that their manuscripts are their original works and that they have not been previously published elsewhere. Parallel submission of the same paper in several journals constitutes ethical misconduct. The work that has already been published elsewhere cannot be reprinted in Bankarstvo Journal.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions. The manuscript must not contain any unfounded or unlawful statements or violate the rights of third parties.

Authors must make sure that their team listed in the manuscript includes all and only those authors who have significantly contributed to the submitted manuscript. If persons other than the authors were involved in the important aspects of the research project and the preparation of the manuscript, their contribution should be acknowledged in a footnote or the Acknowledgments section.

It is the responsibility of the authors to specify the title and code label of the research project within which the work was created, as well as the full title of the funding institution. In case a submitted manuscript has been presented at a conference in the form of an oral presentation (under the same or similar title), detailed information about the conference shall be provided in the same place.

Authors are required to properly cite the sources that have significantly influenced their research and their manuscript. Parts of the manuscript, including text, equations, graphs, pictures and tables that are taken verbatim from other works must be clearly marked, e.g. by quotation marks accompanied by their location in the original document (page number), or, if more extensive, given in a separate paragraph.

In-text citations are stated by listing the author’s last name and year of publication in brackets. The cited parts of the text are followed by the author’s last name, year of publication and the relevant page number in brackets. If there are two authors, they are both stated along with the year of publication, and if there are more than three authors, only the first one is stated (the first author’s last name + et al + year of publication). Each reference must be duly listed in the Bibliography section.

The Bibliography section lists all sources used during the preparation of the manuscript, pursuant to the quotation style used by the concerned journal as stated in the Instruction for Authors.

When authors discover a significant error in their work after its publication, it is their obligation to promptly notify the publisher and cooperate with him/her to retract or correct the paper.

By submitting a manuscript the authors agree to abide by the Editorial Policies of Bankarstvo Journal.

Editorial Responsibilities

The Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision as to which articles submitted to the journal will be published. The decisions are made based exclusively on the manuscript's merit. They must be free from any racial, gender, religious, ethnic, or political bias. When making the decisions the Editor-in-Chief is guided by the editorial policy and legal provisions relating to defamation, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Members of the Editorial Office including the Editor-in-Chief must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. Members who feel they might be perceived as being involved in such a conflict do not participate in the decision process for the particular manuscript.

The manuscripts shall be kept confidential. The information and ideas contained in the manuscripts must not be used for personal purposes without the explicit written consent of the authors.

Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Office shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the authors/reviewers remain anonymous during and after the evaluation process, i.e. until the paper gets published in the journal.

Reviewers' Responsibilities

Reviewers are required to provide the qualified and timely assessment of the scholarly merits of the manuscript. The reviewers take special care of the real contribution and originality of the manuscript. The review must be fully objective. The judgment of the reviewers must be clear and substantiated by arguments.

The reviewers assess the manuscript for the compliance of the content with the journal’s profile, the relevance of the investigated topic, the adequacy of the applied methods, the scientific value of the information presented, the presentation style and scholarly apparatus. The review has a standard format, including the assessments of specific dimensions of the paper, the general assessment and the concluding recommendation. It is submitted, along with the filled-in Instruction for Reviewers, through the online journal management system where it is stored permanently.

The reviewers must not be in a conflict of interest with the authors or research funders. If such a conflict exists, the reviewers are obliged to promptly notify the Editor. The reviewers shall not accept for reviewing the papers beyond the field of their full competence.

Reviewers should alert the Editor-in-Chief about any well-founded suspicions or knowledge of the possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize the relevant sources that have not been considered in the manuscript. They may recommend specific references for citation, but shall not require the citation of papers published in Bankarstvo, or their own papers, unless it is fully justified.

The reviewers are expected to improve the quality of the manuscript through their suggestions. If they recommend correction of the manuscript prior to its publication, they are obliged to specify the manner in which this can be achieved.

All manuscripts sent for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in the submitted manuscripts for their own research purposes without the explicit written consent of the authors.

Dealing with Unethical Behaviour

Any individual or institution may at any time inform the Editorial Office of suspected unethical behavior or other irregularities by submitting the credible information/evidence to start an investigation. The procedure of verifying the submitted evidence takes place in the following way:

  • Editor-in-Chief makes the decision to launch an investigation.
  • During the investigation, any evidence should be treated as confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in the process.
  • The accused authors are given the chance to respond to any charges made against them.
  • If determined that the misconduct really did occur, it is then classified as either a minor or serious breach of the ethical standards.

Minor misconduct (with no influence on the integrity of the paper and the journal, for example, when it comes to misunderstanding or incorrectly applying the publishing standards) will be dealt with in direct communication with the authors and reviewers without involving any third parties. This can be done in the following ways:

  • Sending a letter of warning to the authors and/or reviewers.
  • Publishing the correction of the paper, e.g. when the sources properly quoted in the text are omitted from the reference list.
  • Publishing an erratum, e.g. if it turns out that the error was made by the Editorial Staff.

In the case of major misconduct the Editorial Office may undertake different measures:

  • Official statement.
  • Official notification to the author's/reviewer's affiliated institution.
  • Retraction of the published paper.
  • A ban on submissions from the concerned individual for a defined period of time.
  • Referring the case to the competent organizations or regulatory bodies for further investigation and relevant actions.

In the process of handling unethical behavior, the Editorial Office will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Plagiarism Prevention

Bankarstvo Journal does not publish plagiarized papers. The Editorial Office has adopted the stance that plagiarism, when a person assumes someone else’s ideas, words, or other forms of creative expression as their own, equals a major violation of scientific and publication ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyrights, which is punishable by the law.

Plagiarism includes the following:

  • Verbatim (word for word), or almost verbatim copying, or purposeful (aimed at masking the source) paraphrasing of the portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source;
  • Copying equations, figures or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Any manuscript which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected.

With a view to preventing plagiarism in the journal, the manuscripts are submitted to the plagiarism detection process using iThenticate/CrossRef within SCIndeks Assistant. The thus obtained results are verified by the Editorial Office.

Retraction Policy

The published paper must be retracted in the case of a breach of the rights of the publisher, copyright holders or authors themselves, infringements of professional ethical codes, such as the publication of the same manuscript in several journals, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or any other major misconduct.

Occasionally a retraction can also be used to correct numerous serious errors, which could not have been covered by publishing corrections.

The retraction takes the form of a separate item listed in the contents and labeled as "Retraction". In SCIndeks, as the journals' primary full-text database, a two-way communication (HTML link) between the original work and the retraction is established. The original article is still stored in the unchanged form, except for a watermark on the PDF document indicating on each page that it has been “retracted”.

Retractions are published according to the requirements of COPE operationalized by CEON/CEES as the journal’s primary indexer and aggregator.

Open Access Policy

Bankarstvo Journal is published under the so-called Open Access license. All its content is available to the users free of charge. The users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search the full text of articles, as well as establish HTML links to them, without having to seek the consent of the author or publisher.

The right to use the content without the written consent does not release the users from the obligation to duly cite the journal’s content.

Archiving Digital Version

In accordance with the law, all published volumes of the journal are archived in the digital deposit library of the National Library of Serbia/Matica srpska and concurrently in the Repository of SCIndeks - The Serbian Citation Index as the primary full-text database.

Moreover, the Editorial Office of Bankarstvo Journal has been archiving the digital copies of all published issues since 2005.

Article Processing Charge

Bankarstvo Journal does not charge the authors or any third parties for publication. The manuscript submission and processing services and article publishing services are both free of charge. There are no hidden costs whatsoever.

Copyright

Authors retain the copyrights of the published papers and grant to the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of its further reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media.

Licensing

The published articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA). It is allowed to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, to rewrite, alter and upgrade it for any purposes, even commercial, as long as the appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided, as well as the indication as to whether any changes were made, and the new work gets published under the same license as the original one.

Users are required to provide full bibliographic description of the original publication (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages), as well as its DOI code. In electronic publishing, users are also required to link the content with both the original article published in Bankarstvo Journal and the license used.

Authors may enter the separate, additional contractual arrangements for non-exclusive distribution of the journal published paper (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Self-Archiving Policy

Authors are permitted to deposit the published version of their work in an institutional or subject-based repository, or post it on their personal websites (including their profiles on social networks, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), and on the website of their affiliated institution, at any time after publication in the journal.

In the process, the authors are obliged to provide full bibliographic information about the paper published in this journal (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages), as well as the relevant links to the article's DOI and the license used.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in the published papers do not express the views of the Editor and the Editorial Staff. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in their papers. The Publisher shall not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Editorial Archive

The Editorial Board is obliged to archive the following documents:

  • information on the author;
  • information on the reviewer;
  • originally submitted papers and all requested corrections in Serbian and English;
  • reviews;
  • rejected works;
  • complete journal issues in both print and electronic form;
  • correspondence with authors and reviewers.
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