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Home > Open Access Journals > JSS

 

Policies

Contents

Who Can Submit?

We welcome submissions from students, practitioners, scholars, and experts from the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities, as well as from government, academia, and the private sector. If you have a proposal for a paper or a completed manuscript, please submit it for consideration according to the instructions below.

Anyone may submit an original article to be considered for publication in the Journal of Strategic Security provided he or she owns the copyright to the work being submitted or is authorized by the copyright owner or owners to submit the article. Authors are the initial owners of the copyrights to their works (an exception in the non-academic world to this might exist if the authors have, as a condition of employment, agreed to transfer copyright to their employer).

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General Submission Rules

Submitted articles cannot have been previously published, nor be forthcoming in an archival journal or book (print or electronic). Please note: "publication" in a working-paper series does not constitute prior publication. In addition, by submitting material to the Journal of Strategic Security, the author is stipulating that the material is not currently under review at another journal (electronic or print) and that he or she will not submit the material to another journal (electronic or print) until the completion of the editorial decision process at the Journal of Strategic Security.

Journal of Strategic Security does not charge article processing or submission fees. After publication, authors have the right to post pre-print or post-print versions of their article online, including on their personal, departmental, or institutional repository pages. If you have concerns about the submission terms for the Journal of Strategic Security, please contact the editors.

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Book Reviews

JSS publishes book reviews to make readers aware of new books and seminal works of scholarship on strategic security issues. Our goal is to help readers identify and assess books useful to their research interests. The Journal does not accept unsolicited book reviews. To be considered a reviewer, please contact the editors.

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Formatting Requirements

See Guidelines for authors for details. Although bepress can provide limited technical support, it is ultimately the responsibility of the author to work with the Editors of the Journal of Strategic Security to produce an electronic version of the final article as a high-quality PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format) file.

It is understood that the current state of technology of Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is such that there are no, and can be no, guarantees that documents in PDF will work perfectly with all possible hardware and software configurations that readers may have.

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Copyright for the Journal of Strategic Security

Beginning in 2016, authors will retain copyright under a Creative Commons License. When submitting an article, authors must agree to the following when submitting a manuscript for consideration:

I hereby grant to the USF Tampa Library and the journal publisher the nonexclusive, royalty-free right to distribute, display, and archive this work in a digital and/or print format for non-commercial educational and research uses during the full term of copyright. I warrant that I have the copyright to make this grant to the USF Tampa Library and the journal publisher unencumbered and complete. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyrighted material from other sources.

Following publication, the author’s rights will be protected under a Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0,).

People seeking an exception, or who have questions about use, should contact the editors.

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Open Access Policy for Users

The Journal of Strategic Security is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author for non-commercial purposes. Nonetheless, reproduction, posting, transmission or other distribution or use of the article or any material therein requires credit to the original publication source with a link to both the article and the license. This open access policy is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative's (BOAI) definition of open access.

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Attribution and Usage Policies

Reproduction, posting, transmission or other distribution or use of the article or any material therein, in any medium as permitted or by written agreement requires appropriate credit to the original publication source with a link to both the article and the Creative Commons License.

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Appropriate Use and Documentation of Institutional Review Boards (IRB)

Any research involving human subjects submitted for publication in JSS must be reviewed and approved by a properly constituted and qualified Institutional Review Board (IRB). We request that you provide documentation of that approval with your manuscript submission and have an explicit statement to that effect in the manuscript for our internal review. Please include the IRB name, approval number, approval documentation, and IRB contact information.

Given the sensitive nature of the subject of some of the research methods employed by our authors, we want to be sure that the protocol for any relevant study has been reviewed and approved in advance by a properly constituted and qualified IRB that is independently affiliated with an accredited academic institution.

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General Terms and Conditions of Use

Users of the Scholar Commons website and/or software agree not to misuse the Scholar Commons service or software in any way.

The failure of Scholar Commons to exercise or enforce any right or provision in the policies or the Submission Agreement does not constitute a waiver of such right or provision. If any term of the Submission Agreement or these policies is found to be invalid, the parties nevertheless agree that the court should endeavor to give effect to the parties' intentions as reflected in the provision, and the other provisions of the Submission Agreement and these policies remain in full force and effect. These policies and the Submission Agreement constitute the entire agreement between the USF Libraries, the journal publishers, and the Author(s) regarding submission of the Article.

Ethical Mission Statement

Journal of Strategic Security (JSS) is dedicated to following best practices on ethical matters, errors, and retractions. The prevention of publication malpractice is one of the important responsibilities of the editors of the Journal, comprising the Editor-in-Chief, Senior Editor, Book Review Editor, Editorial Board, and other editorial staff affiliated with JSS.

Any kind of unethical behavior is not acceptable, and JSS does not tolerate plagiarism in any form. Authors submitting articles to JSS affirm that manuscript contents are original and contain no fraudulent data. Furthermore, they warrant that their article has neither been published elsewhere in any language fully or partly, nor is it under review for publication anywhere else.

The following duties outlined for editors, authors, and reviewers are based on the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Editors. Editors, authors, and reviewers will also adhere to the Journal of Strategic Security Policies and Submission Guidelines.

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Editorial Responsibilities

  1. Publication Decisions: The Editor-in-Chief has complete responsibility to accept, reject, or request modifications to any submitted manuscript. S/he does shall only do so in a fair and an impartial manner.
  2. Fair Play: The editors shall not use prejudice or bias of any kind against any author during the review process.
  3. Conflict of Interest: The editors shall not have any conflict of interest with respect to the article under consideration.
  4. Anonymity: Anonymity of reviewers as well as the author shall be maintained during the review process.
  5. Errors in Published Works: When an error is detected, the editors shall promote publication of correction or retraction.
  6. Certainty of Originality: Editors must make every effort to be reasonably certain that each manuscript is evaluated for originality, including but not limited to making use of at least two reviewers through the double-blind peer review process.

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Author Responsibilities

  1. Reporting Standards: Authors shall present an accurate account of their original research as well as an objective discussion of its significance. All authors shall have significantly contributed to the body of research and literature.
  2. Originality: Authors must ensure that they have written entirely original work.
  3. References and Sources: Authors shall fully annotate all sources of data used in the research and cite publications, adhering to the Journal’s Submission Guidelines. All citations must be real and authentic.
  4. Peer Review: Authors are obliged to participate in the peer review process.
  5. Multiple, Redundant, or Concurrent Publications: Author shall not submit the same manuscript to more than one publication concurrently. It is also expected that the author will not publish redundant manuscripts or manuscripts describing the same research in more than one publication.
  6. Authorship of the Paper: Authorship shall be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. Others who have made significant contributions must be listed as co-authors. Authors may use acknowledgements to recognize those who have made other contributions to the manuscript. Authors must also ensure that all the authors have seen and agreed to the submitted version of the manuscript and the inclusion of their names as co-authors.
  7. Disclosure of Financial Support: Sources of financial support, if any, must be clearly disclosed.
  8. Errors in Published Works: All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes, and any error or inaccuracy in submitted manuscripts must be reported to the Editor-in-Chief.

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Reviewer Responsibilities

  1. Standard of Objectivity: Review of submitted manuscripts shall be objective and the reviewers shall express their views clearly with supporting arguments to the editors through the double-blind peer review process.
  2. Conflict of Interest: Reviewers shall not have any conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors, and/or the research funders. Reviewers shall not accept for review any manuscript for which there is a potential conflict of interest, and reviewers shall report to the Editor-in-Chief any issue that may result in a conflict of interest.
  3. Confidentiality: Information regarding manuscripts submitted by authors shall be kept confidential and be treated as privileged information. Manuscripts shall be retained by reviewers for the purpose of review for the publication consideration in the Journal of Strategic Security and shall not be retained or used for any other purpose.
  4. Acknowledgement of Sources: Reviewers should point out relevant published work that is not yet cited. Reviewers must ensure that authors have fully referenced and cited all relevant sources of information used in their research.
  5. Promptness: In the event that a reviewer feels it is not possible to complete a thorough and prompt review of the manuscript within the stipulated time (typically 14-21 days), then this information must be communicated to the editors so that the manuscript can be sent to another reviewer.

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Ethical Publishing

  1. Safeguarding ethics: The monitoring and safeguarding of publishing ethics will be maintained by the editors of the Journal of Strategic Security.
  2. Retracting articles: JSS is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies as appropriate and when needed in accordance with JSS ethical guidelines.
  3. Integrity of the academic record: The editors of JSS shall maintain the highest levels of intellectual and ethical standards, without the interference of business needs.
  4. No plagiarism, no fraudulent data: JSS is committed to only publishing manuscripts that are free from any plagiarism and that contain no fraudulent data. Unethical publication practices are not tolerated by the Journal of Strategic Security.

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