ONLINE SUBMISSION AND PEER-REVIEW PROCESS

Notes for authors

A To be able to submit articles, you need to register first with the Online Submissions &
Peer-review System (OSPEERS). To register as an author, please go to
http://www.inderscience.com/ospeers/authorregister.php.

B The process of submitting a new article involves five steps. To submit a paper online:

 Step 1:

Checklist: This checklist represents the general requirements for all submissions
and authors must indicate, with a checkmark, that they have complied with all the
mandatory requirements.

Select the journal to which you wish to submit your article. If the journal is
accepting submissions for special issues, it will automatically display a drop-
down list with the available special issues.

Tick the Open Access checkbox if you wish your article be published as an Open
Access article.

Optionally, you can enter comments for the editor

 Step 2:

Fill in the authors’ details, the submission title, abstract and keywords. The
system accepts up to 15 authors per article.

 Step 3:

Upload the full-text file of the article in PDF format. Maximum file size is 6 MB.
You do not need to include high-quality images at this stage. Put all the images,
tables and figures in the same PDF file as your article. You will be able to upload
additional files after completing the five submission steps, if necessary.

 Step 4:

Provide the names of four (4) experts (including their names, full addresses and
expertise) in the subject of your submission. These experts must be personally
unknown to the authors and at least two of them must be from a different country
 from the author(s).

We will contact each of your nominated experts to consider conflict of interest

with your article. We ask you to nominate experts as part of our quality
assurance procedures, to ensure that you are aware of the work carried out in
your field by experts from outside your country (*). If the email address of an
expert is not valid, the processing of your submission is suspended until you can
provide us with one which is valid or the expert is replaced.
(*)We are unlikely to use these names in refereeing the submitted paper, but we ask the
nominated experts if they are willing to referee other papers for us and may use some of
them for refereeing future submitted papers in these areas.

Step 5:

Once the online submission is completed, the system will

 display a summary of your submission;

 give you further information about the review process;
 assign a unique ID to your submission and send your article to the
screening process.

The screening is done by staff from the Editorial Office. During the screening
process, the suitability of your submission is analysed, any missing information is
resolved and the identity of your nominated experts are verified. You may be
contacted by the Submissions Manager if something is found missing in your
submission. Once your submission has been screened it can be admitted for
peer-review. The screening process can take various days, depending on the
amount of information that need to be completed or corrected in your submission.

C You will be notified by email when your article has been reviewed and a revised
version of your article is required by the editor. To upload your revised version:

 Login via http://www.inderscience.com/ospeers/login.php

 Find the input box “Author's revised version of file”, click on ‘Browse...’ to select
the revised document to be submitted and click ‘Upload’.

** At the beginning of the revised version, authors must append the reply to the
recommendations made by each of the reviewers. The blind (anonymous) peer-
review process is still ongoing so the paper should not include any author
identification or acknowledgments.

D You will be notified by email when your article is either accepted or rejected. If it has
been accepted you will be required to prepare and upload a final version of your
article. To upload the final version of the paper:
  Authors are asked to restore the author identification, such as names, email
addresses, mailing addresses and biographical statements, on the first page
of the final version file.
 Authors should also upload a compressed file (.zip or .rar) with the Copyright
Agreement forms signed by each author. The preferred file format for your
final version is MS Word.

FAQs

How long will it take to review my article?

This depends on the journal. Please contact the journal editor for more precise
information. However, if your article is still under review after five months, you should
contact us at submissions@inderscience.com

How I will know if my article is being reviewed?

You should periodically login to http://www.inderscience.com and from

http://www.inderscience.com/ospeers/admin/user follow the menu links:
Author -> Track -> View Review Progress
The editor will notify you by email when the first round of review has been completed.

If I do not receive email messages from the Editor, should I assume that nothing is
happening?

No – please do not assume this because there is a chance of our emails being blocked
by your anti-spam filters. Therefore, we advise you to log in to
http://www.inderscience.com at least once a week and from Author -> Track -> View
Review Progress find and click the "Editor/Author Comments" link to see if there is a
new message for you from the editor.

Where can I find further information?

General Information: http://www.inderscience.com/info/inauthors/index.php

Help and technical support are available by email from submissions@inderscience.com.