The Reviewing Process
Publication of original, previously unpublished manuscripts that are in line with the magazine's profile is preceded by submission:
1) initial verification. Any comments entered into the manuscript or in the comments are forwarded to the author by the editors with a request to prepare, if necessary, a revised version of the text, in accordance with the guidelines laid out in the Information for Authors on the SPL website;
2) assessing the submitted text's compliance with the journal's profile and the requirement of its originality. If such compliance is not evident, the editor-in-chief may reject the text without further verification;
3) reviewer's evaluation. For the evaluation of submitted manuscripts (with the exception of reviews of other legal scientific publications, reviews of Polish and foreign literature, reports from scientific conferences), the editor-in-chief, in respect of supervising the review process, appoints at least two reviewers (from Poland or abroad) in consultation with a member of the Editorial Board qualified in a given research area. Reviewers are appointed from among persons cooperating with SPL on a permanent or ad hoc basis, holding an academic title or academic degree in the field to which the publication pertains; reviewers are not members of the editorial board and are not in a conflict of interests with the manuscript's author.
The papers are reviewed on the basis of a double-blind peer review. The editorial board does not appoint as reviewers any persons who are in a direct employment relation with the authors of the manuscript (affiliated to the same institution as the author of the article) or in other direct personal or professional relations that may generate a conflict of interest. In the case of manuscripts by authors from outside Poland, one of the reviewers is an affiliate of a foreign institution other than that of the author submitting the article for publication.
The review is produced in a written form and ends with an unequivocal proposal regarding the suitability of the article (comment, polemical article, gloss) for publication or its rejection. The basis for accepting an article for publication is a high level of writing found by reviewers, fully compliant with the standards of scientific studies. The basis for rejecting the article is, in particular, the manuscript's lack of originality and its low scientific and cognitive value.
The reviewer assesses the submitted manuscript in accordance with the criteria adopted in the review form published on the journal's website (how the title conforms to the substantive content of the study, correct formulation and implementation of the research objective, clarity and coherence in the text's structure, scientific value and research method used, transparency and logic in the argumentation, the degree of to which it enriches the state of research, the author's contribution to science and practice, and the scope of literature used) and proposes to qualify the study by selecting one of the following decisions (accepting the manuscript for publication without changes; accepting the text on condition that changes suggested by the reviewer - with or without his or her additional assessment - are introduced; proposing to refuse to accept the text for publication). In a situation where the reviewer requires the author to include the comments contained in the review in the manuscript with the right to further assessment, the editors send the reviewer for approval. However, should the text receive two conflicting reviews (one of the reviewers does not recommend publication), the editor-in-chief appoints a third reviewer (super-reviewer), whose opinion is decisive.
By electronic means, the editors provide the author with an anonymized review form in order to prepare the final version of the manuscript. After the manuscript is recieved, it is reviewed by the publishing house editor and, following approval by the author, it is sent for publication in the next issue of "Studies in Public Law". Reviews are archived by the editors together with the final version of the article and the author's detailed response to the reviewer's questions.
The editors disclose the names of the reviewers cooperating with the journal in the printed version and on the journal's website in the fourth (and final) edition of the quarterly for a particular calendar year, and do so without indicating the reviewer of a given publication.
Should the scope of scientific research of the submitted manuscript so require, the editor-in-chief also sends the article to the statistical editor for their assessment of the quality of the research described within it.