Guidelines for Authors and Reviewers

The initial step of the review process is done by the editorial board assessing the suitability, as well as the subject area, of the submitted contribution. Papers considered as suitable for the journal will go through a double-blind review process by a minimum of two independent experts in the subject area determined in the initial step. Upon reviewers’ decisions, the Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding the papers’ acceptance or rejection.

The double-blind review ensures the anonymity of the authors to the reviewers, and vice versa. Authors are advised to keep in mind that their anonymity can be compromised by information in the paper, their writing style, subject matter or self-citations.

The reviewer pool consists of the international experts in Civil Engineering and Architecture subjects listed in the journal’s scope. The selection of the reviewers is done by the Editor upon suggestions from the Editorial board, as well as from authors. Reviewers suggested by the authors have to be with the appropriate expertise to review the paper and they should not be current associates of the authors nor co-authors of the authors in the past, nor they can be employed at the same affiliation as the authors of the paper.

 

Peer-Review:

Once a manuscript is checked (scope, preparation and ethics) by an editor, it will be assigned to at least two independent experts for peer-review (either recommended by the authors or by evaluation of the editor). A double-blind review is applied, where authors' and reviewers do not identities of each other.

 

Reviewer Suggestions:

Authors are encouraged to suggest three potential reviewers with the appropriate expertise to review the manuscript during the submission process, which might be approached by the editors. Authors need to provide detailed contact information, bearing in mind that proposed reviews should neither be current collaborators of the co-authors nor have published with any of the co-authors of the manuscript within the last five years.

 

Reviewer responsibilities:

With every information regarding manuscripts submitted, the reviewer must act with confidentiality and treated them as privileged. Reviewers have to ensure that authors have acknowledged all sources used in the research. Reviewers must provide written, unbiased feedback in a timely manner, with scientific evaluation of the manuscript, indicating is the writing clear, relevant and concise with composition, originality and scientific accuracy. Reviewer must maintain the confidentiality of the review process with no sharing or disclosing information from the reviewed paper.

 

Editorial Decision and Revision:

After at least two reviews are received by the editor, he will communicate the decision to the corresponding author, which will be one of the following:

• Accept after Minor Revisions:
  The paper is in principle accepted after revision based on the reviewer’s comments.
• Reconsider after Major Revisions:
  The acceptance of the manuscript would depend on the revisions. The author needs to provide a point by point response or provide a rebuttal if some of the reviewer’s comments cannot be revised. The revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.
• Reject and Encourage Resubmission:
  If additional experiments are needed to support the conclusions, the manuscript will be rejected and the authors will be encouraged to re-submit the paper once further experiments have been conducted.
• Reject:
  The article has serious flaws, and/or makes no original significant contribution. No offer of resubmission to the journal is provided.

All reviewer comments should be responded to in a point-by-point fashion. Where the authors disagree with a reviewer, they must provide a clear response.