Review procedure

Each registered and anonymised research paper is reviewed at least by two independent reviewers according to the double-blind review principle, i.e., both the identity of the reviewer and the author are concealed during the review process. Receiving two positive reviews is a condition for the paper to be accepted for further publication. The review process takes an average of three months. Our journal’s review process is designed to be both rigorous and efficient, with a three-month timeline to meet ministerial requirements and support authors facing grant deadlines. This timeframe is possible thanks to our dedicated editorial team and streamlined workflow, ensuring high-quality peer review without compromising on standards, with a significant number of manuscripts ultimately rejected to ensure only top-quality research is published. To illustrate, the average rate of rejected texts over the last three years is 30% (in the year 2024, we rejected 33 articles from 103 manuscripts). The editorial team of the journal reserves the right to reject the text even in the situation of obtaining two positive reviews, in case the expected time for the author to make corrections would exceed the deadline of three months. This reflects the implementation by EDUsfera Scientific Publishing House of the policy of publishing stability.

The reviewer cannot be related to the author in any way (be the author’s promoter, collaborator, etc.). Reviewers are required to adhere to the principles of publication ethics, by the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Detailed information is available under Publication Ethics.

In the double-blind review procedure, authors are required to submit (1) a title page containing the paper’s title, author’s details, including names, degrees, and titles, affiliations with postal addresses, e-mail addresses, authors’ ORCID numbers, the indication of the corresponding author with his/her telephone number; (2) the actual text in anonymised form, prepared to take into account the following rules:
- removal of authors’ names and affiliations,
- use of the third person when referring to earlier works by authors,
- indicating footnotes to earlier works of authors in anonymised form (e.g., Anonymous, 2009, p. 24)
- checking that figures, graphs, and tables do not contain any indication of the author’s person or affiliation,
- limiting references to previously prepared works only to the extent necessary for the proper conduct of the review process,
- in the bibliography, references to the author’s previous publication should be written as follows: (Anonymous, 2007) [Details omitted for the double-blind review procedure],
- removal of references to sources of funding,
- removal of acknowledgement information,
- removal of any other information identifying the authors.