Publication ethics and malpractice statement

The ethics statements of BWPL follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://publicationethics.org/)

Editorial team’s responsibilities  

The editorial team must also ensure that the journal and its web site have high ethical and professional standards.

The journal and its editorial team and board do not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, race, nationality, religion, career status or sexual orientation. The members of the editorial team ensure that any submitted manuscript is fairly evaluated only in terms of scientific quality and academic integrity. Any information in relation to a submitted manuscript must be kept confidential to anyone but the reviewers and the (corresponding) author.

The editor-in-chief is responsible for the final decision with respect to the publication of a submitted manuscript.

Authors and authors’ responsibilities

 Before submission, authors are required to check if their study meets the profile of the journal, has not been previously published or is being under evaluation with another journal. In case a paper has several authors, the corresponding author must ensure that the authors list should be correct and all authors must have agreed to authorship. The list must not include authors who did not contribute significantly to the study. Should such a situation arise, it will be treated as misconduct. Addition or removal of authors during the publication process are allowed only on the basis of justifiable explanation.

During the review process and, after acceptance, the publication process, the corresponding author must pass on all information received from the editorial staff to the other authors.

The use of previous work, personal or of others, must be cited and appropriately quoted.  If the study involved human subjects, the author(s) must have obtained an informed consent from participants or, in the case of children, from their parents/legal guardians. This should be stated within the article. The names of participants should be kept anonymous. When special approval was required, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, the number of the approval and the name of the committee that granted the approval should also be mentioned within the article.

The author(s) should acknowledge any funding source or administrative support, data collection, etc.

Parallel manuscript submission to more than one journal is unacceptable.

Manuscript submission

Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics accepts any paper, review article and book review in the domain of theoretical and applied linguistics, provided they contain work which has not been previously published. Unpublished work that has been loaded on the authors’ webpage or on academic sites such as researchgate or academia.edu is accepted. Members of the editorial board and of the editorial team may submit papers to the journal. If they do, they will not be involved in the evaluation and reviewing process.

The editor-in-chief evaluates if a submitted manuscript meets the profile of the journal and whether it has been previously published. In case the manuscript is evaluated as unsuitable for the journal, the author is informed within two weeks. If it has not been previously published and is considered suitable for the profile of the journal, it is checked for plagiarism with Turnitin.

Reviewing

One of the members of the editorial team will contact two reviewers within one week after a decision has been made with respect to the suitability of the paper. They are asked to send in their review 6 weeks after they have accepted the invitation and have been sent the manuscript. In case they cannot accept the invitation, the member of the editorial team will find new suitable reviewers.

The reviewers are experts in the (sub-)domain of the paper which they are invited to evaluate. They are not part of the editorial team of the journal and they are asked to disclose any potential conflict of interest prior to the reviewing process.

Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal. The authors are required to secure the anonymity of the manuscript. There should be no author’s name or affiliation on the title page and no reference in the text which could reveal the identity of the author(s) so that the reviewers do not know who the author(s) of the paper is/are.  The reviewers will remain anonymous to the author(s). In case they identify the author(s) they are kindly asked to inform the editorial team. This, however, does not automatically qualify them as unsuitable reviewers.

The peer-reviewing policy ensures that manuscript evaluation is confidential and unbiased. Given the potential diversity of submissions, reviewers are not required to fill in a standardized form. However, it is required that the evaluation of the paper should focus on research integrity, clarity, methodology, coherence, validity, and originality.  The reviewer should ensure that arguments, analyses, statements which have been previously published or reported are accompanied by appropriate reference. Relevant work which the author has not cited should be identified. In case  reviewers notice a significant similarity between the manuscript and previously published studies  they are required to announce the editorial team.

The reviewer must offer polite and constructive suggestions, offer appropriate supporting arguments and clearly account for the final decision: (i) accept; (ii) accept with minor revisions; (iii) accept with major revisions; (iv) revise and resubmit.

Personal criticism of the author(s) is not acceptable. Information obtained through peer review should not be used and should be kept confidential.

If the reviewers give conflicting decisions, one of the members of the editorial board is invited to solve the conflict. In the unlikely case that one of the reviewers postpones sending in the review even after having been kindly reminded of the deadline on several occasions, one of the members of the editorial board will be asked to make a final decision on the basis of the manuscript and one review.

In case the evaluation decision is “accept with minor/major revisions” authors are asked to provide a roadmap letter in which they explain if and how they incorporated the reviewers’ suggestions into the revised version of the paper. The editors reserve the right to reject the revised paper if the author(s) has/have totally disregarded the reviewers’ recommendations.

Once an article has been accepted for publication the author(s) will be asked to format it according to the Style sheet of Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, available on the webpage. The style sheet is an adaptation of The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics (http://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistics/past-reaserach-resources/resources/generic-style-rules.html) and it also includes the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

In the case of book reviews, the editor-in-chief checks if it discusses work which matches the profile of the journal, if the author has not published it elsewhere and whether it is written in accordance with the review format of the journal. If the book review does not meet the focus and scope of the journal, the author is informed within two weeks. Since book reviews do not undergo a blind reviewing process, if a review is considered publishable, the editor-in-chief or another member of the editorial team will check it for plagiarism.  If the review is evaluated as publishable, a member of the editorial team will send the author suggestions, comments, etc. that might contribute to the improvement of the review.

Proposals for themed issues must be sent to the editor-in-chief and, upon approval, the guest editor of the issue is invited to submit the collection of papers, which will be each subject to the same evaluation procedure for papers described above. Guest editors may make suggestions of possible reviewers but the editors reserve the right to have the final decision.

Publication ethics

Research integrity is of utmost importance. The journal takes all measures against publication malpractice and reserves the right to reject any manuscript where misconduct (plagiarism, self-plagiarism, data fabrication, experimental error, citation manipulation, copyright infringement) has been identified. Articles submitted to BWPL are screened for plagiarism with Turnitin. The editors, authors and reviewers follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://publicationethics.org/) in dealing with any allegation of research misconduct relating to a submitted manuscript. When misconduct has been proven, a member of the editorial team will inform the institution of the author.

The authors of rejected manuscripts are offered the opportunity to respond, following COPE. They are required to first address a member of the editorial team. If the situation is not satistactorily dealt with, the authors can address the publisher.

Authors and reviewers must declare any competing interests.