All submitted Chapters/Books will undergo a four-step review process: preliminary check, plagiarism check, independent peer review, and editorial peer review.
Preliminary check: All chapters/Books will be reviewed by the editorial office first for compliance with the Chapter/Books preparation guidelines. Chapters that do not comply with the guidelines will be sent back to the authors to ensure compliance.
Plagiarism check: Chapters/Books that are in compliance with the guidelines will be checked for plagiarism. We work with CrossRef to use iThenticate to detect plagiarism. iThenticate gives a 'similarity index', which is the word-by-word copying of materials from previously published literature. We use similarity index to make a decision. Chapters/Books with more than 10% similarity index will be returned to the authors without peer review for corrective action. For Chapters with similarity index between 1-10%, we follow the guidelines of Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) on text recycling to make a decision. Manuscripts that pass the plagiarism check will be subjected to expert peer review.
Independent peer review: Chapters that pass the preliminary and plagiarism checks will undergo single-blind independent peer review by at least one expert on the topic. Based on the assessments, the reviewer(s) will make one of the following decisions: (i) no further comments; (ii) minor revision required; (iii) major revision required; or (iv) reject. Chapters that require major revision will be returned to the authors for corrective action.
Editorial peer review: Chapters that are categorized under “no further comments” or “minor revision required” by the independent reviewers will be sent to the editor of the book, along with the comments of the reviewers, for editorial peer review. Based on the assessments, the editor will decide whether to accept the comments of the independent reviewers as such or add further comments for the authors to address. After the editorial peer review, the chapters will be sent to the authors for revision and resubmission. The editor will verify the resubmitted chapters for compliance. Once the editor is satisfied with the final version, the editor will notify the publisher. The editor's decision is final. The publisher neither influences nor interferes with editorial decisions.
Chapters written by the editors: Chapters written by the editors will be independently reviewed by at least two experts in the field. The editors are required to address all comments of the reviewers. The resubmitted chapters will be verified by the reviewers for compliance before making a final decision.
Publication
After acceptance, the chapters will be copy-edited and sent for production. The chapters will be published online in three different formats: pdf, html, and xml. They will be open access/Subscription based, freely available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). The publisher will retain the copyright of their work. The book will be assigned an ISBN. Each chapter or complete volume will be assigned a doi and deposited with CrossRef.