Submissions

Author Guidelines

Please read carefully the Manuscript formatting and content guidelines to successfully edit your manuscript. Sign the Originality and Authorship Statement (all authors must fill out and sign the statement) and send it along with the submitted manuscript and associated files.

General information. Authors should make sure their research studies fit the main journal aim and topics and that their manuscripts are written at an advanced English language level. JSSP publishes original research studies and review papers. See more on Aims & Scope.

Originality and Authorship Statement. Authors submitting a manuscript to be considered for publication in Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning must fill out the Originality and Authorship Statement in accordance with the journal’s policy and guidelines on publishing ethics published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Elsevier’s Ethics in Research and Publishing (Publishing Ethics Resource Kit).

Manuscript submission. All submissions should be made on this JSSP Editorial Manager Platform. Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting or, if already registered, can simply log in and begin the five-step process. Before submission authors should make sure they have prepared all files. See the Submission checklist detailed in the section Submission & Publishing – Submit a manuscript. When submitting the manuscript, authors should suggest the names of two possible reviewers from the same scientific field (name and surname, scientific title, affiliation, e-mail). This information can be included in the Cover letter or in the Notes to the editor. All other editorial procedures are operated through the JSSP Editorial Manager Platform. Considering the topic, content and other manuscript-related issues, peer-review process and manuscripts revisions, editorial procedures may last from 8 to 12 weeks.

Peer-review procedure. All manuscripts submitted to JSSP will go through an initial evaluation with the editorial board. Within 2 weeks of submission at most, authors will receive a desk evaluation report communicating either one of the following decisions: acceptance for peer-review, revisions needed before peer-review, or desk rejection. All reviewers are writing a thorough review report in which they follow the guidelines of the editorial board on relevant and exigent content-related and formatting aspects established in accordance with the internationally acknowledged editorial policies. After the manuscripts are peer-reviewed, authors will receive two review reports with final recommendations, namely: Acceptance as it is, Acceptance after minor revisions, Acceptance after major revisions and re-evaluation or Rejection.

Manuscript publication. In the interest of both authors and readers, we adopted the Online First policy. This aims to offer full access to the research results at the earliest date possible, thus reducing the time before submission and publication of a manuscript. Manuscripts accepted for publication will be assigned a DOI and will be available for reading and citation even before the date of the regular publication (be it June or December of a certain year). See Online First.

Publication charges. The APC associated with the publication in the Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning is of 150 Euro/article. According to our policy, a 25% fee waiver is applied to articles whose first authors are Master, PhD or postdoctoral students. Authors in this position should contact the editorial board and confirm their quality by providing a Confirmation Letter from the institution they are affiliated to. In this case the Article Processing Charge will be of 113 Euro. All costs will be charged only upon the acceptance of their manuscripts for publication.

Copyright policy. The copyright shall be retained by the authors. However, the journal is to be recognized as the first publisher of the article.

Conflicts of interest. Transparency and objectivity are essential in scientific research and the peer review process. In case of conflict of interest please contact the editorial board.

Financial disclosure. Authors must acknowledge any financial support they benefitted from in the acknowledgements section of the article, if the case. Please contact the editorial board for any other special circumstances.

Final guidelines and authorship conditions. Authors should make sure they meet the following conditions when submitting a manuscript to be considered for publication in the Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning:

1. Meet the standards set by the editors and editorial policies.
2. Submit original research and/or review articles.
3. Bring a significant scientific contribution in the field.
4. Not reproduce the same content form other co-authored articles already published in other journals, even in another language.
5. Cite all the scientific resources/references and declare sources of data.
6. Acknowledge the involvement of co-author(s) who contributed to the completion of the manuscript (design, data processing, a. o.).
7. Assign the corresponding author. The corresponding author must be assigned when submitting a manuscript. They are the contact persons for both the editorial board and other scholars interested in their research results. The corresponding author should take full responsibility and acts on behalf of all authors of the article.
8. Acknowledge any financial support they benefitted from, if the case.
9. Declare any fundamental errors, even noticed later.
10. In case of conflict of interest authors should contact the editorial board as soon as possible.
11. Sign the Originality and Authorship Statement (all authors must fill out and sign the statement according to which they brought their original contribution to the scientific concept and final editing of the manuscript, they take full responsibility for the scientific content of their work and they agree with the publication of the final version of the manuscript) and send it to the editorial board once with the manuscript submission.
12. In order for your manuscript to be considered for publication in our journal it is mandatory not to be submitted to another journal, or previously published elsewhere, even though in another language. The content of the articles included in our journal may not necessary express our editors’ opinion, therefore authors are responsible for the scientific content of their papers.

Editorial Policies and Expectation of Ethical Conduct. The mission of the Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning is to promote excellency in theoretical and applied geography. The editorial board of JSSP complies with the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines promoted by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Ethics in Research and Publishing published by Elsevier.

Ethical conduct and misconduct. Publication and research ethics. Manuscripts submitted for publication in JSSP should follow the guidelines of writing scientific articles promoted by the Babeș-Bolyai University and in accordance with the international standards regarding the editing of scientific papers promoted by Committee on Publication Ethics. We expect high level of research and ethical behaviour from both our reviewers and authors.

Policy against malpractice. Plagiarism. JSSP promotes valuable scientific contribution and does not accept any form of plagiarism on behalf of the authors. In case authors submit a manuscript and it is found plagiarized by the editorial board or the reviewers, those manuscripts are rejected from publication. The respective authors are subject of subsequent rigorous screening for any other manuscripts they submit later on.

More about plagiarism. Since scientific misconduct can take many shapes and forms experts in Ethics in research and publication (Elsevier) have developed a set of tools, an ethical toolkit meant to support editors, authors and reviewers in their activity of publishing in order to avoid misconduct of any form and comply with research ethics. One of the most common types of publication misconduct is plagiarism – when one author deliberately uses another’s work without permission, credit, or acknowledgment. Plagiarism takes different forms, from literal copying to paraphrasing some else’s work and can include: data, words and phrases, ideas and concepts (Publishing Ethics Resource Kit, Committee on Publishing Ethics).

Anti-plagiarism procedure applied for the manuscripts submitted to be considered for publication in the Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning (JSSP). In accordance with the Decision CA 82/4.01.2022, the annexes thereof and the Senate Decision no. 119/23.09.2021, as well as with the Decision CA UBB 15823/14.11.2022, this document describes the procedure whereby members of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning perform a thorough similarity analysis on the manuscripts submitted for publication. This procedure also establishes a set of rules and terms of use for the specialized text analysis software in order to prevent and avoid plagiarism. More details here.