Publishing Policy

ETHICAL PRINCIPLES

Obligations of the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board

The Editor-in-Chief, in cooperation with the Editorial Board of Tokovi istorije, makes the final decision on which manuscripts will be published. In making this decision, the Editor-in-Chief is guided by the journal’s editorial policy and applicable legal regulations, particularly those relating to copyright infringement and plagiarism.

The Editor-in-Chief retains discretionary authority to assess submitted manuscripts and to reject them if they do not meet the prescribed substantive and formal criteria. Under normal circumstances, the Editorial Board informs authors of the publication decision as promptly as possible following receipt of the manuscript.

The Editor-in-Chief must not have any conflict of interest in relation to manuscripts under consideration. If such a conflict exists, decisions regarding the selection of reviewers and the fate of the manuscript are made by the Editorial Board. If one or more members of the Editorial Board have a conflict of interest, they are excluded from the process of selecting reviewers and deciding on the manuscript. The Editor-in-Chief and members of the Editorial Board are obliged to disclose any conflict of interest in a timely manner.

The Editor-in-Chief must evaluate manuscripts solely on the basis of their scholarly content, without racial, gender/sex, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

The Editor-in-Chief and members of the Editorial Board may not use unpublished material from submitted manuscripts for their own research without the explicit written consent of the author. All information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts must be treated as confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

The Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board are required to take all reasonable measures to ensure that the identity of reviewers remains unknown to authors before, during, and after the review process, and that the identity of authors remains unknown to reviewers until the review process is completed.

 

Obligations of Authors

Authors guarantee that the submitted manuscript is their original contribution, that it has not been published previously, and that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Simultaneous submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes a violation of ethical standards and will result in the manuscript being excluded from further consideration.

If the submitted manuscript is the result of a research project or if an earlier version was presented orally at a conference (under the same or a similar title), detailed information about the project, conference, or related context must be provided in a footnote at the beginning of the text. An article that has already been published in another journal may not be republished in Tokovi istorije, unless it is a translation, adaptation, or substantially revised version based on additional research; this must be clearly indicated.

Authors are required to adhere to ethical standards applicable to scholarly research. They also guarantee that the manuscript does not contain unfounded or unlawful claims and does not violate the rights of others. The publisher bears no responsibility for any claims for damages that may arise.

 

Content of the Manuscript

The manuscript must contain sufficient detail and references to enable reviewers and readers to verify the claims presented. The deliberate presentation of false information constitutes a violation of ethical standards.

Authors bear full responsibility for the content of submitted manuscripts and must, where necessary, obtain consent from all individuals or institutions directly involved in the research presented prior to publication.

Authors who wish to include illustrations, tables, or other materials that have already been published elsewhere must obtain permission from the relevant copyright holders. Materials for which such documentation is not provided will be considered original work of the author. If, after publication, a copyright holder raises a complaint that material was published without authorization, Tokovi istorije will publish a correction or retract the article, clearly stating that the error occurred due to the author’s responsibility.

 

Authorship

Authors must list as authors only those individuals who have made a significant contribution to the content of the manuscript. Contributions by individuals who participated substantially in the research or preparation of the manuscript but do not qualify as authors should be acknowledged in a note or acknowledgment section.

 

Citation of Sources

Authors are required to cite sources accurately. Information obtained through private conversations or correspondence with third parties, during the review of project proposals or manuscripts, or in similar contexts, must not be used without the explicit permission of the source.

 

Plagiarism

Plagiarism—the appropriation of another person’s ideas, words, or other forms of creative expression and presenting them as one’s own—constitutes a serious breach of academic and publishing ethics. Plagiarism may also involve copyright infringement, which is punishable by law.

 

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:

• Verbatim or nearly verbatim copying, or deliberate paraphrasing intended to conceal plagiarism, of parts of another author’s text without clear attribution or appropriate marking (e.g., quotation marks) and citation of the source.
• Copying images or tables from other works without proper citation and without permission from the author or copyright holder.

Manuscripts for which there are clear indications of plagiarism will be rejected and may be taken into account should the same author submit a new manuscript. If a published article is found to be plagiarized, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described in the section “Retraction of Published Articles.”

 

Conflict of Interest

Authors must disclose any financial or other conflicts of interest that could influence the results or interpretations presented in the manuscript.

 

Errors in Published Articles

If authors discover a significant error in their work after publication, they are obliged to notify the editor or publisher as soon as possible and to cooperate in the retraction or correction of the article.

By submitting a manuscript to the Editorial Office of Tokovi istorije, authors agree to comply with these obligations.

 

Obligations of Reviewers

Reviewers are required to provide the editor with a professional, reasoned, impartial assessment of the scholarly value of the manuscript within the prescribed deadlines.

Reviewers evaluate manuscripts with regard to their thematic alignment with the journal’s profile, the relevance of the research field and methods used, the originality and scholarly significance of the data presented, the style of academic writing, and the adequacy of the scholarly apparatus.

A reviewer who has well-founded suspicions or knowledge of ethical violations by the author is obliged to inform the Editor-in-Chief. Reviewers should draw attention to important published works that the authors may have failed to cite and alert the Editor-in-Chief to any substantial similarities between the manuscript under review and other published works or manuscripts under review elsewhere, if they are aware of such cases. If a reviewer knows that the same manuscript is being considered by more than one journal simultaneously, they must inform the Editor-in-Chief.

Reviewers must not have conflicts of interest with the authors or the funding body of the research. If a reviewer reasonably suspects a conflict of interest, they are obliged to notify the Editor-in-Chief without delay.

A reviewer who considers themselves insufficiently competent in the subject area of the manuscript must inform the Editor-in-Chief.

Reviews must be objective. Comments concerning the author’s personality are inappropriate. The reviewer’s judgment must be clear and supported by arguments.

Manuscripts sent to reviewers are considered confidential documents. Reviewers may not use unpublished material from submitted manuscripts for their own research without the explicit written consent of the author. All information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts must be treated as confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

 

Peer Review Procedure

The journal’s policy is that the review process should not exceed two months and that manuscripts accepted for publication should be published within one year.

Manuscripts that, in the opinion of the Editor-in-Chief, meet the basic substantive and formal requirements are subject to anonymous review by at least two external reviewers. The purpose of the review process is to assist the editor in deciding whether to accept or reject a manuscript and to improve its quality through communication with the authors.

Reviewers are selected by the Editorial Board. They must possess relevant expertise in the field of the manuscript and must not be affiliated with the same institution as the author, nor have recently co-authored publications with any of the authors of the submitted manuscript. Reviewers are not remunerated.

The Editor-in-Chief or Editorial Secretaries sends reviewers an anonymized version of the manuscript, without the authors’ names, affiliations, or any identifying information, together with the review form adopted by the Editorial Board of Tokovi istorije. The form includes questions concerning the originality of the manuscript, the methodology applied, the sources and literature used, and the language and style of the text. Reviewers indicate whether the manuscript should be published without revisions, with revisions, or rejected, and propose its categorization (original research article, review article, short or preliminary communication, scholarly critique or polemic, or critical edition of scholarly sources). In a separate section, reviewers may provide comments and suggestions, which are forwarded to the author anonymously. Before, during, and after the review process, authors remain anonymous to reviewers and reviewers remain anonymous to authors.

Throughout the process, reviewers act independently of one another and are not aware of each other’s identities. If reviewers’ recommendations diverge (accept/reject), the Editorial Board may seek additional reviews or make a decision without further review.

During the review process, the Editor-in-Chief may request additional information from the authors (including primary data) if necessary to assess the manuscript’s scholarly contribution. Editors and reviewers must treat such information as confidential and may not use it for personal gain.

The Editorial Board is responsible for ensuring the quality of the review process. If authors raise serious and well-founded objections to a review, the Editorial Board will examine whether the review is objective and meets academic standards. If doubts arise regarding the objectivity or quality of a review, the Editor-in-Chief will seek additional reviewer opinions.

 

Resolution of Disputed Situations

Any individual or institution may at any time inform the Editor-in-Chief or the Editorial Board of suspected violations of ethical standards or other irregularities and submit relevant information or evidence.

 

Examination of Allegations and Evidence

• The Editor-in-Chief, in consultation with the Editorial Board, decides whether to initiate a procedure to examine the allegations and evidence.
• All evidence presented during this procedure is treated as confidential and disclosed only to persons directly involved.
• Individuals suspected of violating ethical standards are given the opportunity to respond to the allegations.
• If irregularities are confirmed, an assessment is made as to whether they constitute minor or serious breaches of ethical standards.

 

Minor Breaches of Ethical Standards

Cases classified as minor breaches are resolved through direct communication with the responsible individuals, without involving third parties, for example:

• Informing the individual responsible that a minor breach has occurred due to misunderstanding or misapplication of academic standards.
• Issuing a written warning.

 

Serious Breaches of Ethical Standards

Decisions concerning serious breaches are made by the Editor-in-Chief in cooperation with the Editorial Board and, if necessary, a small group of experts. Measures may include (individually or in combination):

• Publishing a statement or editorial describing the ethical violation.
• Sending official notification to the supervisors or employers of the responsible individual.
• Retracting a published article in accordance with the procedure described below.
• Prohibiting authors from submitting manuscripts to the journal for a specified period.
• Informing relevant professional organizations or competent authorities so that appropriate measures may be taken.

In resolving disputed situations, the Editorial Board follows the guidelines and recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

 

Retraction of Published Articles

In cases of infringement of publisher, copyright holder, or author rights; violations of professional ethical codes; simultaneous submission of the same manuscript to multiple journals; false claims of authorship; plagiarism; data manipulation intended to deceive; or other serious ethical violations, a published article must be retracted. In some cases, retraction may also be necessary to correct errors discovered after publication.

Standards for handling retractions, as defined by libraries and scholarly bodies and adopted by Tokovi istorije, require that in the electronic version of the original article a link (HTML) be provided to the retraction notice. The retracted article remains available in its original form but is marked with a watermark on each page of the PDF indicating that the article has been retracted (“RETRACTED”).

 

Open Access

Tokovi istorije is published in open access. Articles may be downloaded free of charge from the journal’s website and used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivs 4.0 International license. Submission, peer review, and publication in Tokovi istorije are free of charge.

 

Self-Archiving

Tokovi istorije allows authors to deposit the final, published PDF version of their article in institutional repositories and/or non-commercial databases, or to publish it on personal websites (including academic social networks such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.) and/or on the website of their employing institution, in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivs 4.0 International license, at any time after publication. Authors must provide full bibliographic details of the published article (author(s), title, journal title, volume, issue, pagination) and include the URL of the original publication or the article’s DOI in the form of an HTML link.

 

Copyright

Upon acceptance of a manuscript for publication, authors grant the publisher the following non-exclusive rights to the manuscript, including any supplementary materials and all parts or elements thereof:

• the right to reproduce and distribute the manuscript in print, including print-on-demand;
• the right to print proof copies, reprints, and special editions;
• the right to translate the manuscript into other languages;
• the right to reproduce the manuscript by photomechanical or similar means, including photocopying, and to distribute such copies;
• the right to reproduce and distribute the manuscript electronically or optically using any data carriers or storage media, particularly in machine-readable/digital form on media such as hard drives, CD-ROMs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, minidiscs, or magnetic tapes, and to reproduce and distribute the manuscript from such media;
• the right to store the manuscript in databases, including online databases, and to transmit it through all technical systems and modes;
• the right to make the manuscript available to the public or to closed user groups, upon individual requests, for use on screens or other readers (including e-book readers), and in printed form, via the internet, online services, or internal or external networks.

Authors retain the right to translate the article into another language and to use it in compilations of their own works, in doctoral dissertations or monographs, for non-commercial purposes, provided they indicate that the work is derived from an article published in Tokovi istorije. Full bibliographic details of the original article and the DOI or original URL (as an HTML link) must be provided.

Third parties may use articles in ways not covered by the editorial policy or the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivs 4.0 International license only with the written permission of the journal’s publisher.

 

Disclaimer

The views expressed in published articles do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or members of the Editorial Board. Authors bear full legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in their work. The publisher assumes no liability for any claims for damages.