Editor Guidelines

Editors’ guidelines

Editors are responsible for fair, confidential, timely, independent, and ethically sound handling of manuscripts.

Core Principles

Editors must act with integrity, confidentiality, impartiality, professionalism, and respect for authors, reviewers, readers, and research participants. Editorial decisions must be based on scholarly merit, originality, methodological rigour, ethical compliance, clarity, and relevance to RABSEL.

Editor-in-Chief

The Editor-in-Chief provides overall academic leadership and has final responsibility for editorial standards, editorial independence, publication ethics, and the integrity of the scholarly record. The Editor-in-Chief makes final editorial decisions, except where recusal is required, and leads or delegates responses to ethical allegations, complaints, appeals, and post-publication concerns.

Managing Editor

The Managing Editor coordinates manuscript submission, initial screening, peer review, revision, copyediting, and publication workflows; checks submissions for completeness and declarations; identifies qualified reviewers; maintains records; monitors timelines; and supports implementation of journal policies.

Journal Secretariat

The Journal Secretariat prepares accepted manuscripts for copyediting, typesetting, proof correction, layout, and publication. The Journal Secretariat ensures consistency in format, metadata, issue structure, article presentation, declarations, licensing statements, and publication files.

Recusal

Editors must recuse themselves from handling manuscripts where they have an actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest. The manuscript must be handled by an independent editor or designated Editorial Board member with no conflict of interest, and the recusal must be documented internally.

Editorial Process

RABSEL’s editorial process protects scholarly quality, confidentiality, fairness, ethical compliance, and editorial independence.

Process Overview

Submitted manuscripts pass through technical checking, initial editorial screening, peer review where appropriate, editorial decision-making, revision, final checks, copyediting, typesetting, proof review, and publication. The process is coordinated by the editorial office under the academic oversight of the Editor-in-Chief.

Technical Check

The Managing Editor checks submissions for completeness, anonymisation, formatting, ethical declarations, conflicts of interest, funding statements, data availability statements, and plagiarism or similarity concerns. Incomplete or poorly prepared submissions may be returned before review.

Initial Editorial Screening

Editors assess whether the manuscript fits RABSEL’s aims and scope, is sufficiently developed, has potential scholarly contribution, and meets minimum ethical and editorial standards. Manuscripts outside scope or not ready for review may be declined without external review.

Review and Decision

Reviewable manuscripts are normally sent to at least two independent reviewers. Reviewer recommendations are advisory. The Editor-in-Chief or delegated handling editor makes decisions based on reviewer advice, scholarly merit, originality, methodological soundness, ethical compliance, clarity, and fit with RABSEL.

Records

The editorial office must maintain accurate records of submissions, reviewer invitations, review reports, editorial decisions, author responses, ethics concerns, complaints, appeals, publication schedules, and post-publication notices.