Policies

Open Access

All articles that appear in JVRB are published under an open access license.

A short introduction to Open Access:

The internet offers an excellent possibility to establish an international, intercultural, and globally accessible representation of human knowledge. This development at the same time affects traditional systems of scientific publishing and methods of quality assurance. This refers to the Berlin Declaration, an article drafted by leading German research organisations which support the idea of the internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base. The future web has to be sustainable, transparent, interactive, openly accessible, and compatible concerning different data formats and software. In order to set up such an elaborate system, producers of scientific knowledge are welcome to contribute their scientific research data, including graphics, metadata and raw data, and to make them worldwide accessible. Science and society will greatly benefit from this open access paradigm.

Comparable international declarations are: the Declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.

 

Policy for Previously Published Articles

Submissions that have been published elsewhere, e.g., in a conference proceedings or in an open repository, must be substantially revised.

This means that at least 20% of the paper is material not previously published, and the manuscript features new insights, experiments, analysis, or discussion. The actual amount of extension is judged by the reviewers and may concern additional references, additional graphics, research data or overall writing.

The authors must inform the editors upon submission about any previous publication or presentation of the article. They should provide access to the original version of the article and review the changes in a cover letter. The reviewers receive the information regarding the previous publication upon the start of the review and are granted access to both article versions and the cover letter.