Eligibility
Being a reviewer is a matter of prestige and personal achievement. The benefits of reviewing include the opportunity to see and evaluate the latest work in your research area at an early stage. You may also be able to cite your work for the journal as part of your professional service contributions. Eligible for a reviewer of the Journal of Liberty and International Affairs is a person, who is recognized as an expert in a particular scientific field of interest of the journal, with a strong publication history, working in an academic/research institution, or as an individual researcher, who accepts JLIA standards, instructions for reviewers and publication ethics, work promptly and correctly under firm deadline and speaking English fluently and using internet actively.


Benefits to Reviewers
1. Being a reviewer opens doors to incredible opportunities. Review services will enhance your knowledge of professional standards and quickly earn the respect of your peers.
2. The other potential benefit of being a reviewer is that you will be preferred to be an Editorial Board Member.
3. The reviewer will receive a personalized Reviewer Certificate.


Reviewer Selection
We select reviewers for individual articles based on various factors, including expertise, reputation, specific recommendations from authors, and more. Reviewers for articles are chosen on an issue-by-issue basis. As part of our editorial procedure, we routinely consult potential reviewers before assigning them articles for review. Reviewers are reminded that even these initial messages or conversations contain confidential information.

Reviewers invited by the journal editors must disclose any potential conflicts of interest they may have concerning the article or its authors. All conceivable personal, professional, or financial conflicts of interest should be disclosed.

In our commitment to maintaining a robust peer-review process, we also request corresponding authors to submit two proposals for potential reviewers capable of assessing the merit and quality of the submitted article. These proposals should include the following details for each suggested reviewer:

  1. Full Name
  2. Affiliation
  3. Email Address
  4. Expertise or Qualifications Relevant to the Article

This approach is grounded in the authors' insights into scholars well-versed in the specific field addressed in the submitted article. Furthermore, it is crucial to emphasize that proposed reviewers must have no conflicts of interest with the article’s authors.

It is important to note that we will approach the proposed reviewers through the corresponding author only if our journal’s appointed reviewers are unable or deemed unsuitable to conduct the review of the submitted article.


Apply for Reviewer
The reviewers play a vital role in the publication process, and as a reviewer, you will gain valuable experience in academic publishing. If you are interested in being a reviewer for the Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, please join us by submitting your application at: contact@e-jlia.com

Please download and fill in the APPLICATION FORM

With the application email, please do not forget to attach your CV and List of Publications. The editors of the journal will send you a notification once your application is approved.

The editors reserve the right to make the final decision concerning reviewers.     


Ensuring a Blind Peer-Review
To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

1. The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
2. With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file.

For Microsoft 2003 and previous versions, and Macintosh versions of Word:
Under the File menu select: Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on Save > Save.

For Macintosh Word 2008 (and future versions)
- Under the File menu select "Properties".
- Under the Summary tab remove all of the identifying information from all of the fields.
- Save the File.

For Microsoft 2007 (Windows):
- Click on the office button in the upper-left-hand corner of the office application.
- Select "Prepare" from the menu options.
- Select "Properties" for the "Prepare" menu options.
- Delete all of the information in the document property fields that appear under the main menu options.
- Save the document and close the document property field section.

For Microsoft 2010 (Windows):
- Under the File menu select "Prepare for sharing".
- Click on the "Check for issues" icon.
- Click on the "inspect document" icon.
- Uncheck all of the checkboxes except "Document Properties and Personal information".
- Run the document inspector, which will then do a search of the document properties and indicated if any document property fields contain any information.
- If the document inspector finds that some of the document properties contain information it will notify you and give you the option to "Remove all", which you will click to remove the document properties and personal information from the document.

For PDF files:
With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.


Criteria for Publication
Articles should represent a substantial advance in the particular field within the scope of the journal in terms of:

  • Originality (in an empirical or theoretical sense);
  • Importance to researchers in the field; and
  • Interest for readers and researchers outside the field.


Peer-Review Process

  • After receiving the article, the corresponding author is sent a confirmation email.
  • Articles are subject to initial editorial screening and anonymous peer-review by two reviewers who will be selected by the editors. Firstly, the submitted articles will be evaluated within our initial editorial screening. After this preliminary stage, only afterwards it will be submitted to the peer-reviewers. Our journal operates a closed peer-review process, meaning that reviewers will not know author's details and will themselves remain anonymous to the author.
  • The journal editors reserve the right to return to authors, without peer-review, improperly formatted articles.
  • The journal editorial office does not store electronic materials that are not accepted for publication and does not deliver them back to the authors.
  • The originals of the review are stored in a review of the editorial board for one year.
  • All articles will be checked for plagiarism before being sent to the reviewers. The journal uses the plagiarism screening tool PlagScan, but also reviewers should alert the editors if they suspect any issues relating to author misconduct such as plagiarism.
  • All articles are evaluated according to the reviewers’ recommendations.

There are several types of decisions possible:

  1. Accept the article as submitted;
  2. Accept it with minor revision;
  3. Accept it with major revision; and
  4. Reject the article because it does not fit the journal criteria.
  • Within five weeks after the initial submission, the corresponding author will receive an email confirming whether the article has been rejected. Otherwise, he will receive recommendations expressed anonymously by two reviewers, for revisions to be made before the article is finally approved and published.
  • The revised article must be submitted within one week of the first answer.
  • The final decision regarding publication is made by the editor-in-chief in consultation with associate editors and IEC members (who are experts in the article field), taking into account the reviewers’ recommendations. This decision, together with any relevant reasons, will be sent to the corresponding author.
  • After an article has been accepted for publication, it is processed and typeset in accordance with the design guidelines of the journal, then the corresponding author is issued an acceptance letter and a payment method via Email, and finally, the accepted article is published on the website of the journal, along with all other articles in the issue.

Differences of opinion between reviewers

When differences of opinion occur between reviewers, the editor-in-chief in consultation with associate editors weighs all comments and arrives at a balanced decision based on all comments. To assist in this process, the reviewer should provide the editor-in-chief and associate editors with as much information as possible. A review that clearly outlines reasons both for and against publication is therefore of as much, or even more, value as one that makes a direct recommendation.

If reviewers appear to disagree fundamentally, the editor-in-chief in consultation with associate editors may choose to share all the reviews with each of the reviewers and by this means elicit additional comments that may help the editor-in-chief and associate editors to make a decision. The editor-in-chief and associate editors then assess the recommendations and comments of the reviewers alongside comments by the authors and material that may not have been made available to those reviewers.

When the article has been revised in response to comments by reviewers, or when authors feel their argument has been misconstrued in review, we ask reviewers to offer additional comments on the revised or contested article. We request that reviewers make themselves available to provide such follow-up advice.
 

Expectations Post Review
(in compliance with the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers)

Peer-reviewers should:

  • Continue to keep details of the article and its review confidential.
  • Respond promptly if contacted by a journal about matters related to their review of an article and provide the information required.
  • Contact the journal if anything relevant comes to light after they have submitted their review that might affect their original feedback and recommendations.
  • Read the reviews from the other reviewers, if these are provided by the journal, to improve their own understanding of the topic or the decision reached.
  • Try to accommodate requests from journals to review revisions or resubmissions of articles they have reviewed.


Sharing Review Reports

After finishing the review, reviewers have the option to share it on Publons. They are free to select this choice and record their review reports on Publons.

Acknowledgment to Reviewers
The journal is unwavering in its commitment to acknowledging the invaluable contributions of reviewers. In our dedicated "Acknowledgment to Reviewers" section in every issue, we publicly recognize reviewers upon their consent, demonstrating utmost respect for their dedication and expertise. Our commitment to transparency underscores our appreciation for the vital role reviewers play in upholding the quality of our publications.



We appreciate the time and effort all our reviewers spend evaluating articles for the Journal of Liberty and International Affairs.