Ownership and Management

Revista de Geomorfologie is currently an Open Access journal managed and financed by the Romanian Association of Geomorphologists. No fees are required for papers submission, manuscript processing and publishing.

Publishing Schedule

The journal is issued once per year, the full Volume being available in December. The Editorial Team and reviewers are committed in handling the manuscripts through a peer-review – acceptance – publication procedure of no longer than four months. For each number, a team of Guest Editors is assigned. An initial editorial review of the manuscripts by the Editor in Chief and/or Guest Editors is performed for a preliminary overview of the submissions content. After editorial review, submissions are subject to single-blind peer review evaluation (up to 3 months). Before publication, editing of the manuscripts and English proofreading are managed by the Technical Board of the journal. Individual articles are DOI-assigned and published as Online First papers, which can be cited by DOI until the completion of the full Volume.

Publication Ethics and Malpractice

In terms of Publication Ethics and Malpractice, Revista de Geomorfologie follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. The documents which are supporting this approach are the COPE Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors and the COPE Core Practices. In this framework, the detailed responsibilities of the Editors, Reviewers and Authors are described below.

Responsibilities of the Editors

Confidentiality

The Editor-in-Chief, Guest Editors and Editors, as well as any other editorial staff which they are directly and indirectly working with must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to any other person or institution except the corresponding author and the invited reviewers.

Publication decisions

The Editor-in-Chief and the Guest Editors are responsible for deciding which submitted and peer-reviewed papers will be published in each particular issue. During the entire evaluation process, the Editor-in-Chief and the Guest Editors will not take into consideration non-scientific aspects like authors' nationality, ethnic origin or race, religion, gender, sexual or political orientation. The publication decision will be reflected solely by the scientific level and by its relevance to the journal's scope. Copyright infringement and plagiarism are eligible criteria for publication decision.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by any of the editors or the members of the editorial board (including reviewers) for personal research purposes, unless a specific request is being submitted to the authors, followed by an answer containing an explicit written consent.

Responsibilities of the Reviewers

Role in the editorial decisions

The peer-reviewing process is designed to help the editors in making properly-substantiated editorial decisions. In the meantime, the peer-review process is aimed at improving the quality of the manuscript submission in case such a potential is foreseen. 

Confidentiality 

Any manuscript received, considered suitable or not for the review process by the editors, is treated as confidential document. The editors and the reviewers are the only persons entitled to access its content, while other exceptions are specifically authorized by the Editor-in-Chief.

Promptness

If the reviewer, following an editorial request, feels either unqualified to review the submitted manuscript or cannot undergo the process in the suggested time, will notify the editor immediately, which will withdraw it from the review process and reassign the manuscript to another potential reviewer.

Objectivity

Reviews are conducted objectively and focus solely on scientific aspects, while personal criticism is not recommended. The comments or suggestions should be expressed in a clear and focused manner and supporting arguments should be provided.

References acknowledgement

Reviewers will notify the Guest Editor(s) if any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under revision and any other published material (article, review, report, technical note, etc.) of which they have personal knowledge are noticed. Reviewers should identify cases in which proper citations are needed or when relevant published work referred to in the paper has not been cited in the references list.

Disclosure and conflict of interest

The Editor-in-chief and Guest Editors will select reviewers that will not be directly profesionally linked and/or affiliated in the same institution with the authors of the reviewed manuscripts. Nevertheless, in case of clearly-declared conflicts of interests (competition or collaboration relationships with any of the authors), the reviewers should not consider the received manuscripts and should notify the Guest-Editor immediately. Any scientific information derived from the peer review process must be kept strictly confidential and will not be used for personal advantage.

Responsibilities of the Authors

Originality, plagiarism policy and sources/references acknowledgement

Authors will submit only completely original works. Any proven sign of plagiarism will result in the immediate rejection of the manuscript. The authors should appropriately cite or quote the work and the words of other authors. A standard for the references list is provided in the Author Guidelines document. Statements containing personally-induced inaccuracies or frauds will be judged as unacceptable under unethical behavior liability.

Before peer-review, the submitted papers are screened for plagiarism automatic detection using the turnitin software (https://www.turnitin.com/ro). 

Data access and retention

Authors could be asked by the Editor-in-Chief to provide raw data of their study together with the paper, if the reviewer is making a well-argumented demand. The authors should ensure data accessibility to other competent professionals for at least three years after publication (via an institutional or subject-based data repository), provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and legal rights concerning proprietary data do not preclude their release.

Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication

It is highly recommended that papers describing essentially the same research results should not be published in more than one journal. Submitting the same paper to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. As well, a manuscript already published and copyrighted cannot be submitted. Manuscripts which are undergoing a review process in Revista de Geomorfologie should not be resubmitted to copyrighted publications. By submitting a manuscript, the authors retain the rights of the published material and if published, they permit the use of their work (copied and distributed) under the conditions of the Common Creative Licence.

Authorship of the paper

Authorship is provided to all those who provided significant contributions to the manuscript. Among themselves, the authors should decide unanimously the first author, the correspondent author and the co-authors in an agreed succession. Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conceptual approach, design, execution, or interpretation of the research results. A less contribution of one/several person(s) can be acknowledged in a distinct section of the manuscript. Prior to the sending of the material, the corresponding author will verify and acknowledge that all co-authors have approved the final version of the paper which will be submitted for review and eventual publication, and certify this within the Statement of originality and authorship form.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

All the sources which have provided financial support that allowed the obtaining of the presented research results should be clearly mentioned, including the name of the research project, its duration, its coordinator and the financing authority.

Fundamental errors in published works

If significant errors or inaccuracies in the published article are detected by any of the authors, it is their obligation to notify immediately the Editor-in-Chief and to cooperate with the editorial team to correct the paper in form of an erratum.

Archiving

The publisher of Revista de Geomorfologie is committed to a permanent availability and preservation of all the published materials and in the meantime it ensures the accessibility by maintaining an own digital archive. All the published issues and individual articles are freely accessible in pdf format.