State & Society

Article Submission and Peer Review Procedure

All manuscripts submitted to the journal Państwo i Społeczeństwo / State and Society undergo a multi-stage editorial and peer-review procedure designed to ensure the highest scholarly quality and compliance with international ethical standards. The detailed course of the process is presented below.

Manuscript submission

Authors submit manuscripts through the Open Journal Systems platform: [link]. Guidelines concerning manuscript preparation and the required documents are available here: [link] [link].

Initial editorial assessment

The Editorial Secretary conducts an initial technical and formal assessment of the submission, including:

• compliance with the thematic scope of the journal,

• fulfilment of the formal requirements set out in the Instructions for Authors.

If these requirements are not met, the manuscript is returned to the Author with a request for correction and/or completion.

A manuscript that meets the formal requirements is forwarded to the Section Editor for substantive assessment.

If the manuscript does not fall within the thematic scope of the journal or does not meet the required scholarly quality standards, including originality, scientific potential, and appropriate use of the relevant literature, it is rejected. The Editorial Office is not obliged to provide reasons for rejecting a manuscript, and the decision of the Section Editor is final.

Manuscripts that receive a positive substantive assessment are submitted for plagiarism screening.

A high similarity index or lack of references to sources results in rejection of the manuscript. The journal does not apply fixed percentage thresholds for determining plagiarism. Each similarity report is analysed and assessed individually by the Editorial Office. Every borrowing from another publication must be accompanied by an appropriate reference.

Manuscripts that successfully pass the plagiarism screening are forwarded for peer review.

Peer review — double-blind peer review

Manuscripts qualified by the Section Editor for the next stage are sent for review in accordance with the principle of double anonymity:

• reviewers do not know the identity of the Author(s),

• Authors do not know the identity of the reviewers.

The Section Editor appoints at least two independent reviewers affiliated with institutions other than those of the manuscript’s Author(s). Reviewers are selected on the basis of their expertise in the relevant field and the absence of any conflict of interest.

Preparation of reviews

Reviewers assess manuscripts using a standard review form, taking into account, among other things:

• the quality of argumentation and logical structure,

• coherence and linguistic precision,

• the currency and relevance of the selected literature,

• the originality of the approach to the topic.

The review includes one of the following recommendations:

• acceptance without revisions,

• acceptance subject to revisions,

• rejection of the manuscript.

Each decision must be justified in detail. The deadline for preparing a review in the first round is 14 days; in the second and subsequent rounds, where applicable, the deadline is 7 days.

Editorial decision

On the basis of the reviews, the Section Editor makes a decision regarding publication of the manuscript:

Acceptance without reservations — both reviews are positive and contain no substantive comments.

Revisions required — Authors are required to address the reviewers’ comments or provide a justified response to them. The revised version must be submitted within the prescribed deadline. The Section Editor is responsible for ensuring that the Author revises the manuscript in accordance with the reviewers’ recommendations. At the reviewer’s request, the manuscript may be sent for re-review. If the re-review is negative, the manuscript is rejected.

One negative review — the final decision is made by the Section Editor, who may reject the manuscript or send it to a third reviewer, whose opinion will be decisive.

Two negative reviews — the manuscript is rejected in full. No procedure for revising the manuscript is provided after two negative reviews.

Informing the Authors

Authors receive the decision together with anonymised reviews, without any information identifying the reviewers. If revisions are required, Authors must submit a response to the reviews together with the revised manuscript. The response must address each of the reviewers’ comments.

Final qualification for publication

After the revised manuscript has been accepted by the Section Editor and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, it is forwarded for language editing.

The decision of the Editor-in-Chief is final.

Language editing and author approval

After completion of the peer-review procedure, manuscripts are forwarded for language editing. In the case of manuscripts written in English, the text is additionally checked by a translator or native speaker. Authors then receive the edited manuscript for approval of the introduced changes. Failure to respond within the prescribed deadline is treated as acceptance of the text.

The Editorial Office reserves the right to propose revisions, based on its own assessment and/or the reviewers’ opinions, and may make publication of the manuscript conditional upon their implementation.

If any doubts concerning the manuscript arise at the stage of editorial work carried out by the Publishing House, including editing or author approval, they are resolved by the decision of the Editor-in-Chief.

Typesetting and post-typesetting proofreading

After the introduced changes have been approved, the manuscript is sent for typesetting and then for post-typesetting proofreading carried out by the Publishing House. The article in PDF format is then sent to the Author for final author proofreading. The deadline for this stage is 48 hours. Failure to respond within the prescribed deadline is treated as acceptance of the text.

Publication

Articles are published on the journal’s website and indexed in relevant scholarly databases. All articles are made available in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Publication charges

The journal does not charge any fees for manuscript submission or publication. The costs of preparing the article for publication are covered by the Publisher.