Journal Policy

The journal Structural Integrity and Life publishes original articles that have not been previously published, e.g. original scientific papers; review papers; professional papers; technical reports, book reviews; doctoral theses reviews; letters; selected news from the scientific and professional domain. The journal Structural Integrity and Life is an Open Access journal.

Contributions to the journal may be submitted in English and/or in Serbian language. If the contributions are written in Serbian language, the manuscript title, abstract, keywords, author affiliations, all should be translated to English. All cited references are to be written using Roman or Latin script with diacritical marks.

The Journal is issued three times a year.

Selected papers are published in the journal Structural Integrity and Life that cover these particular fields in science and engineering: analyses, design, testing, health monitoring, integrity assessment, case studies and engineering sciences of engineering structures. The journal aims to provide a recognizable forum for the research in the field of structural engineering and life of systems and components. We welcome the latest developments in the theory, experimenting and design methods that relate to engineering structures such as mechanical, civil, energy, power plants, chemical and processing, transportation, mining, metallurgy, welding, environmental hazards and protection, etc. Special thematic issues are occasionally published and are devoted to important regional events that cover topics as integrity and life, risk, safety and health of engineering structures.

 

Editorial Responsibilities

The editor is responsible for making final decisions on which articles submitted to Structural Integrity and Life will be published. The editor is guided by the policies of the journal's Editorial Board and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Editors must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. If an Editor feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the paper shall be made by the Editorial Board.

Editors shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor’s own research without the express written consent of the author.

 

Authors’ responsibilities

Authors warrant that their manuscript is their original work that has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The Authors also warrant that the manuscript is not and will not be published elsewhere (after the publication in Structural Integrity and Life) in any language without the consent of the copyright holder.

Authors warrant that the rights of third parties will not be violated, and that the publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions, the validity of the experimental results and must make sure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the data public.

Authors wishing to include figures or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s) and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Authors must make sure that all only contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that papers submitted to Structural Integrity and Life are written with ethical standards in mind and that they not contain plagiarism. Authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of others.

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal Editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.

 

Peer review

The submitted papers are subject to a peer review process. The purpose of peer review is to assist the Editor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author it may also assist the author in improving the paper. The peer review process is transparent, double-blind peer review. Upon submitting the paper, authors may also suggest potential peer reviewers. The reviewers are given a 45-day period to complete their reviews. Reviewers may be paid or be given the right to free copies of selected printed editions from the publisher (DIVK – Society for Structural Integrity and Life).

The choice of reviewers is at the editors' discretion. Reviewers must possess the required knowledge about the subject area of the manuscript; they must not be from the same institution as the authors, and should not have recent joint publications with any of the authors.

Reviewers must not have conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.

Any selected reviewer who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or is aware that the prompt review shall be impossible, should notify the Editor without delay.

Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers shall express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents.

In the main reviewing phase, the Editor sends submitted papers attached with instructions or guidelines and reviewer forms to at least 2 experts in the field. The reviewers’ evaluation forms are to be filled out and contain a checklist in order to help the reviewers cover all aspects that may decide the fate of a submission.  In the final section of the evaluation form, the reviewers should include observations and suggestions aimed at improving the submitted manuscript. These are then sent to authors, without the names of the reviewers. Reviewer identity remains secret to authors before, during and after the reviewing process. Authors are reminded to omit all their personal information and other data from manuscripts, that could compromise their identity.

The reviewers engaged in evaluating a manuscript act independently and are not aware of each other’s identities. If the decisions from the reviewers are not the same (accept/reject), the Editor may assign additional reviewers.

The Editorial team shall ensure reasonable quality control of the reviewing process. With respect to reviewers whose reviews are convincingly questioned by authors, special attention shall be paid to ensure that the reviews are objective and of high academic standard. When there is any doubt with regards to the objectivity or quality of the review, additional reviewers shall be assigned.

 

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other creative expression as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism may constitute the following:

       word for word, or almost word for word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of other's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (i.e. using quotation marks);

       copying equations, figures or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

All submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism. The publisher has been encouraged by CEON/CEES (Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science, an independent, Belgrade-based ST&I observatory, non-governmental, non-profit organisation with the status of a legal person, aimed to work on issues of evaluation in science and higher education) to apply software and web-related code VeP, for the purpose of plagiarism verification. This service provided by CEES and SCIndeks (Serbian Citation Index) implement iThenticate software services for the verification of plagiarisms.

Manuscripts showing obvious signs of plagiarism shall be automatically rejected and further restrictions shall be imposed on authors: a permanent or temporary denial for manuscript submission. Such authors will be requested to send a letter of pardon to the original authors.

 

Retraction Policy

Articles already published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as long as it is possible. However, occasionally, circumstances may arise where a published article must later be retracted. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct mistakes while preserving the integrity of the science; it is not aimed to punish the author.

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Structural Integrity and Life: in the electronic version of the retraction note, a link is made to the original article. In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged, with added watermark on each PDF sheet indicating that it is ‘retracted.’

 

Open Access Policy

Structural Integrity and Life is an Open Access Journal. Authors reserve the right of article ownership. All published articles can be downloaded free of charge and used in accordance with the Creative Commons License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The authors are free to choose for themselves the appropriate Creative Commons License Module. Licensed users are not allowed to remix, change, or build on original published material.

The Editorial Board, or the Publisher (DIVK) do not have the responsibility to pay authorship fees, nor are they obliged to charge the authors for publishing of articles.

 

Self-archiving Policy

The journal Structural Integrity and Life allows authors to deposit author's post-print article (accepted version) and publisher's version/PDF in an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, such as KoBSON, Digital Repository of the National Library of Serbia, SCOPUS, ELSEVIER, etc. or to publish articles on an Author's personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.) and/or on the website of the author’s institution in compliance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), at any time after the publication in the journal. Publisher copyright and source must be acknowledged and a link must be made to the article's DOI.

 

Copyright

Once the manuscript is accepted for publication, authors shall transfer the copyright to the Publisher. If the submitted manuscript is not accepted for publication in the journal, all rights shall be retained by the author(s).

Authors grant the Publisher the following rights concerning the manuscript, including any supplemental material, and any parts, extracts or elements thereof:

       the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript in printed form, including print-on-demand;

       the right to produce pre-publications, reprints, and special editions of the Manuscript;

       the right to translate the Manuscript into other languages;

       the right to reproduce the Manuscript using photomechanical or similar means including, but not limited to photocopy, and the right to distribute these reproductions;

       the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript electronically or optically on any electronic media and all data carriers or storage media – especially in machine readable/ digitalized form on data carriers such as hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray Disc (BD), Mini-Disk, data tape – and the right to reproduce and distribute the Article via these data carriers;

       the right to store the Manuscript in databases, including online databases, and the right of transmission of the Manuscript on all technical systems and modes;

       the right to make the Manuscript available to the public or to closed user groups on individual demand, for use on monitors or other readers (including e-books), and in printable form for the user, either via the internet, other online services, or via internal or external networks.