Peer review

General provisions:

All manuscripts submitted to the Journal (Ekologiya i Stroitelstvo) are mandatorily registered and go through blind review. The manuscript is examined only in an anonymous (impersonal) presentation. The journal accepts double anonymous peer review: reviewers receive a manuscript without the name of the author; the names of reviewers remain unknown to the authors. The editorial staff of the journal independently selects the reviewer and is guided by ethical principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). For more information please read Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers.

The initiator of the examination is only the editor of the journal – the chief editor or the scientific (thematic) editor.

Well-known specialists recognized in their professional communities who have publications in topics relevant to the peer-reviewed manuscript within the last five years are involved in the peer-review process.

Articles are reviewed either by members of the editorial board or guest reviewers (including foreign scientists), who are specialists in the corresponding field of knowledge.

Based on the results of the examination, the reviewer recommends, and the scientific editor (executive secretary) makes one of the following possible decisions:

– «to reject»;

– «to send for revision taking into account the comments of reviewers»;

– «to publish».

Manuscript revision may be defined by the reviewer as «minimal and without additional reviewing» or «significant with additional reviewing».

All reviewers work on a voluntary basis, without paying for their work.

The review represents a certain (critical) genre of non-fiction. In the Author's Agreement, which is concluded between the author of the article and the Copyright Holder, there is a clause on obtaining by the editors of the journal of exclusive rights to review for the purpose of reproducing, transmitting, distributing or using the review in another way. The author's agreement is free of charge for both parties. The reviewers' task is to assess the novelty and scientific merit of the paper, reliability of research results, clarity of the text, relevance of the title and abstract to the content of the paper, correctness of the list of references (in particular, identifying publications relevant to the topic of research that were not, but, according to the reviewer, should be mentioned in the article).

Ethical principles of peer review:

The reviewer performing expert evaluation of the author's materials (manuscript) shall be guided in their actions by the following principles:

– the manuscript received for peer-review is considered as a confidential document that cannot be transferred for review or discussion to third parties who do not have authority from the Editorial Board of the Journal (Ekologiya i Stroitelstvo);

– material evaluation is unbiased;

– reviewer respects the author's point of view, personal criticism of the author is unacceptable;

– the review is an objective and reasoned assessment of the presented research results, contains reasoned criticisms regarding the level and clarity of the presentation of the submitted material, its compliance with the journal profile, novelty and reliability of the results;

– the reviewers' recommendations are the basis for the final decision to publish the article;

– unpublished data obtained from manuscripts submitted for review are not used by the reviewer for personal purposes;

– the reviewer who, in his opinion, is not qualified to evaluate the manuscript or cannot be objective (conflict of interest with the author), at his request, is excluded from the review process of this manuscript;

– the reviewer informs the members of the Editorial Board of the Journal (Ekologiya i Stroitelstvo) if the peer-reviewed manuscript has significant similarities with previously published articles, that is, about cases of plagiarism;

– the reviewer must notify the Editorial office if he finds any conflict of interest, or any other circumstances that prevent them from forming a fair and impartial assessment of the article.

Review content recommendations:

The editors recommend the following review structure to reviewers:

– brief summary of the reviewed manuscript (will help the author understand whether the reviewer has correctly understood the article in order to avoid ambiguous or even false interpretation of the text of the reviewed work);

– assessment by criteria: relevance of the topic; novelty of research; academic objectivity; correctness, reliability and verifiability of the obtained results; depth of investigation and completeness of presentation assessment of the probability of practical use of the obtained results; assessment of the prospects for further research in this direction;

– comments, suggestions and comments on the revision of the manuscript text if the reviewer intends to recommend the manuscript for publication;

– final evaluation of the work and recommendation to publish or reject the manuscript according to the criteria:the article is recommended for publication in its present form; the article is recommended for publication after revision following reviewer’s recommendations, without additional reviewing; manuscript requires substantial revision, with additional reviewing; the article is rejected from publishing in the journal.