Editorial policies

Editorial responsibilities

The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to Computer Science and Information Systems will be published. The Editor-in-Chief is guided by the Editorial Policy and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to decide not to publish submitted manuscripts in case it is found that they do not meet relevant standards concerning the content and formal aspects. The editorial staff will inform the authors whether the manuscript is accepted for publication between four and eight months from the date of the manuscript submission.

The Editor-in-Chief must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. If the Editor-in-Chief feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the paper shall be made by the Vice Editor- in-Chief or the Editorial Board.

The Editor-in-Chief shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

The editors and the editorial staff must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

Editors and the editorial staff shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors before, during and after the evaluation process. In the case where authors requested the execution of the double-blind review procedure, the editors and the editorial staff shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the authors remain anonymous to reviewers until the end of the review procedure.

Author's responsibilities

Authors warrant that their manuscript is their original work, that it has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere (“publication” excludes “self-archiving”, please see the Self-archiving policy section below). Parallel submission of the same paper to another journal constitutes a misconduct and eliminates the manuscript from consideration by Computer Science and Information Systems.

The authors also warrant that the manuscript is not and will not be published elsewhere (after the publication in Computer Science and Information Systems) in any language without the consent of the publisher.

In case a previous version of the paper has been presented at a conference (under the same or similar title), detailed information about the conference should be provided during submission. The version submitted to Computer Science and Information Systems should contain a substantial amount of novel material compared to the conference version (roughly, at least 40% more). A paper that has already been published in another journal cannot be reprinted in Computer Science and Information Systems.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that papers submitted to ComSIS are written with ethical standards in mind. Authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of third parties. The publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Reviewer’s responsibilities

Reviewers are required to provide written, competent and unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the manuscript.

The reviewers assess manuscript for the compliance with the profile of the journal, the relevance of the investigated topic and applied methods, the originality and scientific relevance of information presented in the manuscript, the presentation style and scholarly apparatus.

Reviewers should alert the Editor to any well-founded suspicions or the knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and alert the Editor to substantial similarities between a reviewed manuscript and any manuscript published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, in the event they are aware of such. Reviewers should also alert the Editor to a parallel submission of the same paper to another journal, in the event they are aware of such.

Reviewers must not have conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editor without delay.

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other creative expression as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism includes the following:
• Word for word, or almost word for word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);
• 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.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism.

Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected and the authors banned from submitting papers to ComSIS indefinitely.

In case plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described below under Retraction policy, and authors will be banned from submitting papers to ComSIS indefinitely.

Peer review

Criteria for acceptance will be appropriateness to the field of the Journal, taking into account the merit of the content and presentation. Number of pages is limited to 20 (using the appropriate LaTeX template). However, where excessive length reflects an unclear line of argument, the manuscript will be rejected. Manuscripts should be clearly written. Abstracts should be self-contained and informative of what was learned from the research. Rigorous argument and presentation are expected throughout.

Manuscripts will be refereed in the manner customary with scientific journals before being accepted for publication. Upon receiving a manuscript, 3-4 members of the Editorial Board will examine it and if the paper is out of scope of the journal or does not meet the basic criteria for a journal article, it will be immediately rejected without further review. Otherwise, the Editor-in-Chief will solicit reviews from at least two external referees. Based on the reviews, the Editor will make the decision on manuscript acceptance, or solicit additional reviews if the decision in unclear. Possible decisions are Accept Submission (without change), Revisions Required (minor revisions), Resubmit for Review (major revisions required), and Decline Submission. Regarding conditional acceptance decisions, the Editor will distribute the revised manuscript to the reviewers for approval. In case of high discrepancy between opinions of reviewers, three core Editorial Board members will be assigned the task of consolidating the reviews.

Retraction policy

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or any major misconduct require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistake while preserving the integrity of science; it is not to punish the author.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Computer Science and Information Systems: In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is not retained.

Open access policy

Computer Science and Information Systems is an Open Access journal. All articles can be downloaded free of charge and used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ComSIS charges a nominal fee for printed volumes only.

The journal does not charge any fees at submission, reviewing, and production stages of regular articles. ComSIS reserves the right to charge a nominal fee to cover article production and printing expenses of some special sections and/or special issues.

Self-archiving policy

Computer Science and Information Systems allows authors to deposit author's post-print (accepted version) and publisher's version/PDF in an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, such as arXiv or to publish it on an author's personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.) and/or departmental website, at any time after publication. Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and a link must be made to the article's DOI.

It is also permitted to deposit draft/pre-print versions before or during the review process, but the Editor-in-Chief must be notified of this beforehand.

Copyright

Once the manuscript is accepted for publication, authors shall transfer the copyright to the publisher. If the submitted manuscript is not accepted for publication by the journal, all rights shall be retained by the author(s).