Policies

Review Process

Decisions

There are three possible editorial decisions for a paper submitted to JSys:

• Accept with shepherding
• Revise
• Reject

Each decision and its consequences is explained below.

Accept with shepherding

The paper can be accepted with minor edits that can be completed within one month. Authors who submit on March 1st and get an acceptance decision by March 15th can submit the final manuscript by April 15th. The final manuscript will be made immediately available online.

Revise

The paper needs work that will take more than one month. The authors can submit a revised version in a following JSys deadline. The reviewing timeline for a resubmission is the same as a regular paper.

Please refer to the details in the Instructions for Authors.

Reject

The paper needs more than three months of work to be accepted to JSys. The authors cannot submit the same work for one year to JSys. A rejection decision usually stems from a fundamental mismatch between the work and the journal such as the work is too narrow or out-of-scope. Rejection decisions imply that, even with more experiments or revised writing (that can happen in three months), the paper would not be acceptable for the journal.

We hope to reduce the number of rejection decisions by being clear about what would be acceptable for the journal.

Return without Review

For every paper submitted to JSys, the Editors-in-Chief and Area Chairs will try to find expert reviewers. If they are unsuccessful, or if the relevant Editorial Board members already have been assigned their maximum load for the deadline, the paper will be returned to the authors without review (usually within a week or so). Authors will be invited to resubmit to the next deadline, in which case their work will be reviewed in priority.

We believe this is a preferable outcome than overloading reviewers (thereby lowering the quality of reviews for everyone) or having paper reviewed by non-expert in a paper’s topic. We aim to tailor the editorial board size and expertise to prevent this situation from happening as much as possible.

Contemporary Work

Any peer-reviewed work that was published (PDF available on the publisher’s website) less than two months prior to the initial submission is considered contemporary with the submission. Reviewers will not penalize the submission for not comparing with contemporary work. However, reviewers may ask for a qualitative comparison to be added in the final version of the submitted work.

Copyright and Originality

All work submitted to JSys must be original work. The authors must have the copyright for the submitted work. Simultaneous submissions are not allowed: any work submitted to JSys must not be under consideration for another workshop, conference, or journal.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a serious form of dishonesty and fraud. Alike most scientific journals, JSys prohibits plagiarism and may take action against authors who commit them.

That being said, we trust our authors’ ethical behavior: JSys does not use any plagiarism checking system until proven necessary.

Open Access Policy

JSys applies the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license to all works it publishes.

Under the CC BY-NC license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their work, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in JSys, so long as the original authors and source are cited, and the material is not used for commercial purposes. No permission is required from the authors nor the publisher.

JSys open access policy meets the DOAJ definition of “open access.”

Rights and Permissions

JSys does not require copyright transfer, only a non-exclusive permission to publish and archive the article.

Copyright holders retain copyright ownership, granting a non-exclusive license to the JSys and eScholarship to publish the article, meaning that the author may also publish it elsewhere. Before submitting an article to the journal, please be sure that all necessary permissions have been cleared in any third party material. All articles published in JSys are subject to the journal’s author agreement.

Prices

JSys does not charge any authors processing charges (APCs) or submission charges. It is completely free for the authors to publish their work in the journal.

JSys does not charge anything for readers either. All published papers are publicly accessible from the Read page.

JSys is managed operated by volunteers. If you appreciate the journal and what it stands for, please consider contributing.

Publishing Schedule

Accepted manuscripts at JSys are made available online immediately.

Once per year, JSys publishes all accepted manuscript into one volume. Each volume is further divided into issues depending on the number of manuscripts to publish.

Removal and Revision

Once published, an article cannot easily be revised or removed.

We believe it is important to provide perpetual access to materials published whenever possible and appropriate. However, we will remove publications under special circumstances, including in the case of submission errors, rights violations, or inappropriate content. Please be aware, however, that even after the removal of a work, a citation to the work will remain in our system, along with a URL.

If you would like your work removed from JSys, please contact the editors.

Once articles are published, we are generally unable to revise them.

If a significant error or omission is discovered, please contact the editors.

Long-term Preservation Policy

All materials submitted to JSys are automatically deposited in CDL’s Merritt Preservation Repository for long-term preservation.

Advertising

JSys allows authors to advertise their work under submission as long as minimal precautions are taken to not blatantly violate double-blind reviewing. Refer to the Instructions for Authors for details.