Studia Prawnicze. Rozprawy i Materiały / Studies in Law: Research Papers

Peer Review Process

• Article Submission
• Initial Editorial Assessment
• Plagiarism Screening
• Peer Review — Double-Blind
• Preparation of Reviews
• Editorial Recommendation and Final Decision
• Informing the Authors
• Final Qualification for Publication
• Language Editing and Author Approval
• Typesetting and Proofreading
• Publication
• Publication Charges

All manuscripts submitted to the journal Studies in Law: Research Papers 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.

Article Submission ↑

Manuscripts may be submitted through the Open Journal Systems platform. Guidelines concerning manuscript preparation and the required documents are available here.

Initial editorial assessment ↑

The Editorial Office conducts an initial assessment of the submission, including:

• compliance with the thematic scope of the journal,

• fulfilment of formal requirements, including length, formatting, citation style, and completeness of metadata,

• originality and scholarly potential.

If formal deficiencies are identified, Authors may be requested to make the necessary corrections or provide the required supplementary materials before the manuscript is forwarded for review.

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, the Section Editor recommends its rejection. The Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision to reject the manuscript at this stage. The Editorial Office is not obliged to provide detailed reasons for rejecting a manuscript at the initial stage.

Plagiarism screening ↑

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

A high similarity index or lack of references to sources results in the 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 footnote or bibliographic reference.

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

Peer review — double-blind peer review ↑

Manuscripts qualified for the next stage are sent for review in accordance with the principle of double anonymity, namely double-blind peer review:

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

• Authors do not know the identity of the reviewers.

The Editorial Office 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:

a. acceptance without revisions,
b. acceptance subject to revisions,
c. rejection of the manuscript.

Each decision must be justified in detail.

Editorial decision ↑

On the basis of the reviews, the Editorial Office makes a decision concerning the further processing of the manuscript:

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

• Revisions required — Authors are required to revise the manuscript in accordance with the reviewers’ comments or to provide a substantive and reasoned response where a given comment is not implemented. The revised submission must include an anonymised manuscript with all changes clearly indicated, either by using Track Changes or by highlighting the modified text in colour, as well as an anonymised, point-by-point response to the reviews, prepared separately for each comment raised by each reviewer.

  The revised manuscript and the response to reviewers must not contain any information that could identify the Author(s). The revised version must be submitted within the prescribed deadline. The Editorial Office verifies whether the Author has revised the manuscript in accordance with the reviewers’ recommendations. At the reviewer’s request, the manuscript may be sent for re-review. In the case of a negative re-review, rejection of the manuscript is recommended.

• One negative review — the decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief, the Deputy Editor-in-Chief, or the Editorial Secretary. The manuscript may be:

  • sent to a third reviewer,

  • rejected if the reviewer has raised significant objections.

• Two negative reviews — the manuscript is automatically rejected.

Informing the Authors ↑

Authors receive the editorial decision together with anonymised reviews, without any information identifying the reviewers.

If revisions are required, Authors are obliged to submit, within the prescribed deadline, the following anonymised files:

• a revised manuscript with all changes clearly indicated — changes should be marked either by using Track Changes or by highlighting the modified text in colour;

• a detailed response to the reviewers’ comments — the response must address each comment raised by each reviewer separately and in a structured manner, for example: “Reviewer 1, Comment 1: … / Response 1: …”, “Reviewer 1, Comment 2: … / Response 2: …”, “Reviewer 2, Comment 1: … / Response 1: …”, etc.;

• a clean revised version of the manuscript.

The response to the reviewers must clearly indicate how and where the manuscript has been revised. If the Authors decide not to implement a particular comment, they must provide a clear and substantive justification.

All files submitted at the revision stage must be fully anonymised. In particular, the revised manuscript, the response to reviewers, file names, document metadata, acknowledgements, funding information, references that may identify authorship, supplementary materials, and any other files submitted through the system must not disclose names, affiliations, institutional details, e-mail addresses, ORCID identifiers, project numbers, or any other information that could reveal the identity of the Author(s).

Final qualification for publication ↑

After the revised manuscript has been verified by the Deputy Editor-in-Chief or the Editorial Secretary and formally accepted by the Editor-in-Chief, it is forwarded for language editing.

Language editing and Author approval ↑

After completion of the peer-review procedure, manuscripts are forwarded for language editing.

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.

Any doubts concerning the manuscript that arise at the stage of editorial work carried out by the Publishing House, including language editing or author approval, are resolved definitively by 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 completing proofreading at 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. In case of questions concerning the editorial procedure, please contact: sp@uafm.edu.pl.