How We Publish and Editorial Independence

1. Publishing principles

• Researcher-centred editorial responsibility: qualified academic editors evaluate scholarly content and oversee peer review.
• Editorial independence: acceptance and rejection decisions are insulated from APC revenue, marketing objectives, sponsorship and publisher sales interests.
• Quality before volume: Eldran does not impose acceptance quotas or rejection-rate targets.
• Constructive peer review: reviewers are asked to assess validity, methods, evidence, transparency, ethics and interpretation rather than perceived prestige or likely citation impact.
• Research integrity by design: mandatory plagiarism, text-similarity and AI-writing screening occurs before external peer review, with additional integrity checks during review, before publication and after publication when concerns arise.
• Transparency: journal scope, peer review model, fees, licences, editorial roles and exceptions should be stated publicly.
• Accountability: material decisions, conflicts, reviewer activity and integrity interventions are documented in the editorial system.

2. Editorial independence

Editors have authority over the scholarly content of the journals they serve. The publisher provides infrastructure, policy, training, operational support, legal and integrity support, and quality assurance, but does not direct editors to accept work for revenue, publicity, relationships or volume.

An Editor-in-Chief may intervene to protect due process, consistency, integrity and journal standards. Publisher-level intervention is reserved for matters such as research misconduct, manipulated peer review, legal risk, serious conflicts, cross-journal cases, privacy, sanctions or other issues requiring institutional responsibility. Scientific judgments remain editorial judgments.

No acceptance quota Eldran does not require editors to achieve a fixed acceptance rate. A manuscript is evaluated against published journal standards and the evidentiary record of the review.

3. What happens after submission

4. Stage 1: submission and technical validation

Technical validation is a gateway to editorial assessment, not a scholarly acceptance decision. A manuscript may be returned to the author for administrative correction before an editor is assigned.

• complete manuscript and supplementary files;
• author names, affiliations, contact details and ORCID identifiers where supplied;
• anonymised review file where required;
• authorship and contributorship information;
• funding and competing-interest disclosures;
• ethics approval, consent, trial registration, animal welfare or other study-specific declarations;
• data, code and materials availability statements where applicable;
• basic reference, figure, table and file integrity;
• mandatory plagiarism, text-similarity and AI-writing screening through Turnitin or iThenticate, followed by human editorial review;

5. Stage 2: initial editorial assessment

The handling editor assesses whether the submission falls within the journal's aims and scope, presents a sufficiently clear scholarly purpose, meets minimum methodological and reporting standards, and is suitable for external review.

A manuscript may be rejected without external review where fundamental scope, ethical, methodological, reporting or integrity issues make further review inappropriate. The decision should identify the main reason in clear terms.

6. Stage 3: reviewer selection

Editors select reviewers for relevant subject, methodological, technical, statistical, policy or practice expertise. Reviewer identity should be verified using reliable scholarly or professional information. Author suggestions may be considered but do not control reviewer selection.

• current or recent close collaboration with an author;
• same institutional unit where independence may reasonably be doubted;
• financial, personal, supervisory, legal or competitive relationships;
• involvement in the study, dataset, intervention or product under review;
• circumstances that could create a reasonable perception of bias.

7. Stage 4: double-anonymous external peer review

Eldran's default model is double-anonymous peer review: authors are not told reviewer identities, and reviewers are not told author identities through the journal. Absolute anonymity cannot be guaranteed where a preprint, public dataset, conference presentation or specialised research programme makes authorship inferable.

Full-length research and other externally reviewed scholarly articles ordinarily require at least two independent reviewer reports before acceptance. Editors may invite additional reviewers when reports conflict, expertise is incomplete, or specialist assessment is needed.

Reviewers are asked to focus on validity, design, methods, analysis, evidence, reporting, ethics, transparency, limitations, references and whether the conclusions are supported. They should not recommend rejection merely because they believe a study will have limited prestige or citation impact.

8. Stage 5: revision and editorial decision

Authors normally receive the substantive review comments used in the decision and are asked to respond point by point. They may disagree with a reviewer request, but should explain the reason with evidence or a clear scholarly justification.

Reviewer recommendations are advisory. The handling editor is responsible for the decision and may weigh reviews differently depending on expertise, reasoning, conflicts and relevance. Conflicting reports may be resolved by editorial judgment or additional independent review; they are not settled by simple majority vote.

• Accept
• Minor revision
• Major revision
• Reject
• Reject without external review

9. Stage 6: final validation and production

An acceptance decision moves the manuscript into final validation. Eldran may verify review completeness, unresolved integrity concerns, declarations, licences, metadata, references, author information, figures and supplementary files before publication.

If a material concern is discovered after provisional acceptance but before publication, the article may be returned to review, placed on hold or rejected. Acceptance does not override research-integrity or legal obligations.

10. Publication and Version of Record

The Version of Record is published on the journal website with the applicable open-access licence, article metadata, publication date, author information, declarations, references and DOI or other persistent identifier where operational. Corrections and retractions are linked transparently to the published article.

11. Research-integrity safeguards

Research integrity is not confined to a single pre-review screen. Concerns may be raised by authors, reviewers, editors, readers, software-assisted screening, institutions, external researchers or other credible sources at any stage.

• plagiarism and substantial text overlap;
• fabricated, falsified or manipulated data;
• inappropriate image alteration;
• authorship manipulation or authorship for sale;
• paper-mill indicators;
• compromised or fabricated peer review;
• citation manipulation or coercive citation;
• undeclared competing interests;
• missing or questionable ethics approval, consent or registration;
• duplicate or redundant publication;
• misleading reporting or selective omission of material information.

A credible concern may pause editorial processing while the journal seeks clarification, original data, ethics documentation, image files, code, authorship confirmation or other information. Outcomes may include continuation, additional review, rejection, correction, retraction or referral to an institution or other responsible body where appropriate.

12. Technology and AI-assisted checks

Every submitted manuscript must undergo plagiarism and text-similarity screening and an AI-writing check before external peer review. Eldran uses a licensed Turnitin or iThenticate service for these mandatory checks: Turnitin (https://www.turnitin.com/products/similarity) and iThenticate (https://www.ithenticate.com/). Similarity and AI indicators are evidence for human editorial assessment; no score alone establishes misconduct or determines an editorial decision.

All automated flags are evaluated by an editor with appropriate responsibility. No automated system makes the final accept or reject decision.

Confidential manuscripts and peer-review materials must not be uploaded to unapproved public generative-AI systems by editors or reviewers.

13. Editorial roles

14. Financial safeguards

Article processing charges, waivers, discounts, sponsorship and business development are administratively separate from scholarly assessment. Reviewers should not be told an author's payment status. Editors must not be given acceptance targets tied to revenue.

Any honorarium or compensation for editorial service must not be calculated from the number of accepted articles handled by an editor. Collection or journal growth targets must never supersede publication standards.

15. Special collections and guest-edited content

Thematic collections and special issues follow the same peer review, conflict, integrity, licensing and decision standards as regular submissions. Guest editors do not have authority to weaken journal standards, guarantee acceptance, or handle their own manuscripts.

Detailed requirements appear in the Eldran Thematic Collections and Special Issues Policy.

16. Post-publication stewardship

Publication is not the end of editorial responsibility. Eldran considers credible post-publication concerns, corrects material errors, issues expressions of concern where warranted, and retracts work when the scholarly record cannot responsibly stand.

Where comments or correspondence features are offered, they are moderated under journal conduct and research-integrity rules and do not replace formal correction procedures.

17. Quality indicators and transparency

Eldran may publish operational information such as submission-to-first-decision times, review times, acceptance dates, usage statistics and correction history when the underlying data are genuine and the metric is clearly defined. The publisher will not fabricate impact factors, indexing status, citation counts, usage or external certifications.

Journal pages should state the peer review model, article types, APCs, licensing terms, editorial team, contact information, publication schedule and any exceptions to normal review. Published research should show publication dates and, where available, submission and acceptance dates.

18. External standards and guidance

• Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing: https://doaj.org/apply/transparency/
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): https://publicationethics.org/
• COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers: https://members.publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/cope-ethical-guidelines-peer-reviewers-v2_0.pdf
• World Association of Medical Editors (WAME): https://www.wame.org/
• EQUATOR Network reporting guidelines: https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/
• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

19. Scholarly standards infrastructure and discovery

Eldran may refer to scholarly organisations and infrastructure providers as guidance, services or discovery systems. These references do not claim membership, indexing, certification or operational integration. Status wording must describe the relationship accurately and may change only after the relevant service has confirmed it.

Crossref and the DOI resolver are relevant to persistent identifiers and metadata distribution. Eldran may describe article DOIs as registered through Crossref only after its registration workflow is operational. A published DOI should be displayed as a resolvable DOI link.

Google Scholar is an external scholarly search service. Eldran may prepare article pages and metadata to meet published inclusion guidance, but it must not use an Indexed in Google Scholar badge or equivalent claim merely because an article can be found in search results. ORCID identifiers may be displayed or linked when supplied and verified through the applicable workflow.

• Crossref: https://www.crossref.org/
• Crossref DOI resolver: https://doi.org/
• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/
• Google Scholar inclusion guidance: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html
• ORCID: https://orcid.org/

20. Related policies

These pages provide the related publisher-level requirements and should be read together with this document where their subject matter applies.

• Peer Review Policy: https://eldranacademic.com/policies/peer-review/
• Open Access and Licensing Policy: https://eldranacademic.com/policies/open-access/
• Thematic Collections and Special Issues Policy: https://eldranacademic.com/policies/thematic-collections/
• Research Integrity: https://eldranacademic.com/policies/research-integrity/
• Corrections and Retractions: https://eldranacademic.com/policies/corrections-and-retractions/
• Complaints and Appeals: https://eldranacademic.com/policies/complaints-and-appeals/