Policies

FOCUS AND SCOPE

The International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy is an open access, blind peer reviewed journal that seeks to publish critical research about common challenges confronting criminal justice systems around the world.

The global production of knowledge in the social sciences has been structurally skewed towards the Anglophone countries in the Global North (Connell 2007). Criminology as a field of knowledge, until recently, has had a highly selective focus on crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North. The Global South is a concept that acknowledges the unequal relations of power that shape the lives of the current and formerly colonised, enslaved and dispossessed nations by imperial powers that dominated 9/10th of the world until recently (Carrington, Hogg, Sozzo 2016). It is not a geographic divide but an epistemological grid of power that has shaped social scientific knowledge.

The Journal is committed to cognitive justice (de Sousa Santos 2014) and as such aspires to democratise knowledge, bridge global divides and encourage the voices of those on the periphery to publish with the Journal. This includes scholars from diverse Indigenous and first nations peoples communities, as well as scholars from the Global North and South committed to cognitive justice.

References:

Carrington K, Hogg R and Sozzo M (2016) Southern criminology. British Journal of Criminology 56(1): 1–20. http://doi.org10.1093/bjc/azv083

Connell R (2007) Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge social science. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin

de Sousa Santos B (2014) Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge

The International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy is supported by the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. The Journal is published by QUT using Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open source software application for managing and publishing scholarly journals.

Authors retain copyright and articles are licenced via Creative Commons to make published articles more readily available and useable. There are no APCs (Article Processing Charges). Authors can submit and publish at no cost.

SECTION POLICIES

ARTICLES

Articles should be between 6,000-8,000 words in length. Articles longer than 8,000 words (including abstract, appendices and references) may not be considered for review and publication. The manuscript should also include an abstract of no more than 150 words

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

BOOK REVIEWS

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

REVIEW ESSAY

Peer review essays of a number of books will now be accepted for publication subject to peer review. These essays will be 6-8000 words in length. They need to be innovative, original and add to the existing body of knowledge of relevance to the journal themes.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

 

INTERVIEW

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

PEER REVIEW PROCESS

Articles can be submitted at any time. All articles submitted to the journal will undergo a blind peer review by at least two reviewers. Reviews will normally take around 4-6 weeks. Reviewers will be recruited from the International Editorial Board, and other suitably qualified academics based on the subject matter of received submissions. Special Editions also require blind peer reviewing. Decisions of the Chief Editors are final and not subject to review or appeal. Articles provisionally accepted for publication pending revisions must resubmit a final version within three months.

If your article is already accessible on a pre-print server this may compromise our double-blind review policy - please email the Journal Manager for further information crimjournal@qut.edu.au

SPECIAL ISSUES

The International Journal for Crime Justice and Social Democracy (IJCJSD) publishes four issues per year: March, June September, December.

All queries related to special issues should be sent to crimjournal@qut.edu.au.  Prospective guest editor(s) are required to complete an EOI. As well as the theme, the EOI should include a short biography for each editor and proposed contributors. The Journal Editorial team will assist with the call for submissions. Guest Editor(s), in liaison, with the Journal Editorial team, will ensure articles are within the scope of the Journal themes.

The double-blind peer review policy requires a minimum of two independent reviews. The review process will be determined in consultation between the Editorial team and the Guest Editor(s).

Submissions reviewed, accepted and finalised for the special issue should be sent to the Journal Manager and cc-ed to the Chief Editor(s) who will conduct a final review for suitability.

Guest Editor(s) are provided with appropriate information (Guest Editor Guidelines and EOI template) to assist with the workflow.

PREPRINTS

The Journal will consider submissions already available as a preprint on condition that the author agrees to the below:

• The author retains copyright to the preprint and developed works from it and is permitted to submit to the journal.
• The author declares that a preprint is available within the cover letter or ‘Comments to Editor’ presented during submission. This must include a link to the location of the preprint.
• That the preprint submission is clearly cited and included in the Reference list.

In Harvard (references) the correct citation style is as follows:

Citation:  (Author Year)

Reference:

Author, AA (year of publication) Title of article Title of Journal, Preprint. viewed Date Month Year. DOI:xx.xxx/xxxxxx or <URL>

The author acknowledges that having a preprint publicly available means that the journal cannot guarantee the anonymity of the author during the review process, even if they anonymise the submitted files.

• The authors are required to update the information associated with the preprint version to show that a final version has been published in the Journal, including the DOI linking directly to the publication.

 Please email the Editor for further information crimjournal@qut.edu.au 

PUBLICATION FREQUENCY

Articles for consideration can be submitted at any time. The Journal publishes four full issues per year: 1 March; 1 June; 1 September; and 1 December. There may be early release of articles published at any time as Online First.

COPYRIGHT

Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE GENERATED CONTENT

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) tools—such as ChatGPT and others based on large language models (LLMs) cannot have accountability for a published work or research design, nor can it have legal standing to hold or assign copyright. In accordance with COPE’s position statement on AI tools—these tools cannot fulfill the role of, nor be listed as, an author of an article.

The following statement from COPE:

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements

Full statement: https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author

If an author/s has used this kind of tool to develop any portion of a manuscript, its use must be described, transparently and in detail, in the Methods or Acknowledgements section. The author is responsible for the accuracy of any information provided by the tool and for correctly referencing any supporting work on which that information depends. Tools that are used to improve spelling, grammar, and general editing are not included in the scope of these guidelines. The final decision about whether use of an AIGC tool is appropriate or permissible lies with the Journal’s editor.

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy is a free to read, free to publish, institutionally supported journal.

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy defines open access according to the definition provided by Open Access Australasia:

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.  Through licensing via an open license (usually a Creative Commons License), freely available outputs can also be legally shared and reused. Hence, open access is more than just free access.

Additionally, the Journal recognises the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) principles and recommendations for open access (updated in March 2022) which note that “…OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research.”

An information page summarising open access and open access publishing can be found here

SEX AND GENDER IN RESEARCH (SAGER GUIDELINES)

The editors encourage authors to follow the ‘Sex and Gender Equity in Research – SAGER – guidelines’ and include sex and gender considerations where relevant. Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing terms

The SAGER Guidelines (developed by the European Association of Science Editors [EASE]) provide recommendations for reporting of sex and gender information in study design, data analysis, results and interpretations of findings. They are primarily designed to guide authors in preparing their manuscripts. These guidelines are now accompanied by a checklist which authors should review.

Definition of Sex and Gender (taken from Office of Research in Women’s Health, NIH).

Sex - refers to biological differences between females and males, including chromosomes, sex organs, and endogenous hormonal profiles.
Gender - refers to socially constructed and enacted roles and behaviours which occur in a historical and cultural context and vary across societies and over time.

The SAGER guidelines and checklist are endorsed by COPE of which IJCJSD policies are aligned to.

ARCHIVING and SELF-ARCHIVING

Authors are permitted (and encouraged) to post their accepted work online in institutional/disciplinary repositories or on their own websites. Pre-print versions (accepted for publication) posted online should include a citation and link to the final published version in the International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy as soon as the issue is available; post-print versions (including the final publisher's PDF) should include a citation and link to the journal's website.

This journal currently utilises the LOCKSS program which offers decentralized and distributed preservation, seamless perpetual access, and preservation of the authentic original version of the content. The PKP Preservation Network (PN) ensures that journals that are not part of any other digital preservation service (such as CLOCKSS or Portico) can be preserved for long-term access. The Journal title is included in a digital archive https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/2202-8005 and has a deposit policy with Sherpa Romeo at https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/36243 

EDITORIAL POLICY

• Papers must be submitted with the understanding that they have not been published elsewhere (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or thesis) and are not currently under consideration by another journal. If your article is already accessible on a pre-print server this may compromise our double-blind review policy - please email the Journal Manager for further information crimjournal@qut.edu.au
• The submitting author is responsible for ensuring that the article's publication has been approved by all the other co-authors. It is also the authors’ responsibility to ensure that the articles emanating from a particular institution are submitted with the approval of the necessary institution. Further correspondence and galley proofs will be sent to the corresponding author(s) before publication unless otherwise indicated.
• It is a condition for submission of a paper that the authors permit editing of the paper for readability.
• All articles submitted will also be checked for plagiarism. Authors retain copyright and articles are licenced via Creative Commons to make published articles more readily available and useable. There are no APCs (Article Processing Charges). Authors can submit and publish at no cost.We reserve the right to grant licences to third parties which own/manage reputable public access databases to include online access to the journal and its articles.
• Special Editions also require blind peer reviewing and are subject to the same editorial policy.
• Authors or Special Edition editors who do not comply with agreed timelines for production schedules may have the publication of their papers delayed.
• All production decisions are made by the Chief Editors in consultation with the Journal Manager. Decisions of the Chief Editors are final and not subject to review or appeal.

ETHICS AND MALPRACTICE STATEMENT

This journal subscribes to the Code of Conduct for best practice and ethical journal editing and publication (see COPE http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines) Recognising our ethical and other responsibilities, we take all possible measures against malpractice and we are committed to ensuring that reprint, advertising or other commercial revenue or political gain has no impact or influence on editorial decisions. We publish papers based only on their quality, importance, originality, and relevance to our remit. We evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, citizenship, ethnic origin, or political philosophy of the authors.

We also acknowledge different guidelines to inform research practice, underpinned by the principles expressed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. For example, the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research and Te Ara Tika — guidelines for Māori research ethics.

We are committed to ensuring ethics in publication and high quality of scholarship. Conformance to standards of ethical behaviour is therefore expected of all parties involved: Authors, Editors, Reviewers, and the Publisher.

Authors: By submitting a manuscript, the author(s) warrant that the manuscript is their own, original work and that it has neither been published previously nor is currently being considered for publication elsewhere. Submitting the same manuscript concurrently to more than one journal is unacceptable. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical conduct and is unacceptable. The corresponding author should ensure that there is a full consensus of all co-authors in approving the final version of the paper and its submission for publication.

Editors: The editors of this journal will evaluate manuscripts exclusively on the basis of their academic merit and fit with the journal's themes. The editors are responsible for deciding which submitted papers should be published. The editor and any editorial staff must maintain confidentiality and not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher. The editors will not use unpublished information in their own research without the express written consent of the author. Editors should take reasonable responsive measures when ethical complaints have been presented concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper. Editors will recuse themselves from considering manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships/connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the papers; instead, they will ask another member of the editorial board to handle the manuscript.

Reviewers: This journal uses a blind peer review process which assists in making editorial decisions. The review process usually takes 4-6 weeks. Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used by reviewer without the express written consent of the author. Reviews should be conducted objectively, and observations should be formulated clearly with supporting arguments. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers. Peer reviewers’ identities are protected as are authors.

CORRECTIONS

Occasionally authors may request corrections to a published article.  The decision to correct an article is the responsibility of the editorial team. All requests for corrections are considered on an individual basis and in consultation with the editors.  Where a correction is made, IJCJSD will update and publish the article with a new DOI, and a correction notice will be published separately.  Updated metadata will be redelivered to our various indexing services.

RESPONSES AND REJOINDERS

Some authors may submit short commentaries, letters to the editor or responses to published articles, book reviews, review essays or interviews to voice differences of opinion or perspectives on a particular topic.

For transparency and fairness, IJCJSD recommends that all such responses are evaluated by the journal editor for content and accuracy. In accordance with the guidance issued by COPE, it is recommended that authors of the criticised publication are permitted the opportunity to respond to the critique prior to its publication.

PLAGIARISM

All articles submitted to the journal will be subject to checks for plagiarism. Apart from peer review, the journal uses the software iThenitcate to check for possible plagiarism.

Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical conduct and is unacceptable. The corresponding author should ensure that there is a full consensus of all co-authors in approving the final version of the paper and its submission for publication.