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Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be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.