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Editorial Policies

Peer Review Process

All submissions are initially assessed by one or more of the Editors, who decide whether or not the article is suitable for peer review. Submissions considered suitable for peer review will then be peer-reviewed in a double-blind process, by at minimum two reviewers from the journal’s editorial advisory board or from the body of other experts in the field. A manuscript or artwork request for submission from a journal Editor or Guest Editor is not a guarantee that the submission will be published. The journal’s Coordinating Editor is responsible for overseeing review processes and decisions. All final decisions will be made by the Handling Editor. Please bear in mind that most articles will be recommended for revision before final acceptance.

All submissions will be confirmed electronically upon entry into the online system. Our goal is to notify authors about the status of their submissions within two to three months of initial receipt.

Confidentiality and Anonymity 

Our review process is confidential and must be treated as such by all individuals involved in the submission and review process: authors, editors, external reviewers, and staff.

External reviewers should not contact anyone directly involved in the review process without first receiving approval from the Editor managing the review process, and review reports should not be publicly shared. We do not publish the names or comments of external reviewers, nor do we release external reviewer’s identities to authors unless reviewers ask to be identified.

Open Access 

Articles in Media+Environment are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0 International). Upon submission, the corresponding author will indicate agreement to publish under this license on behalf of all authors. Under the CC-BY license, authors retain copyright to their work and allow others to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt their work, provided proper attribution of authorship and source is given.

Open access ensures not only the widest dissemination possible, but also the greatest impact, by allowing others to cite, re-purpose, and build upon existing published research. Articles published in Media+Environment are available for download in machine- as well as human-intelligible formats: HTML, PDF, XML.

Competing Interests, Funding and Ethics 

To ensure transparency, all authors, reviewers and editors are required to declare any interests that could compromise, conflict or influence the validity of the publication. In addition, authors are required to specify funding sources and detail requirements for ethical research, if appropriate, in the submitted manuscript. See our Author Guidelines for more details.

Corrections, Retractions, Additions

Amendments to published articles will be made only if they affect the integrity and accuracy of the scholarly record. Formal notifications will be published on the Media+Environment website, falling into one of two categories:

• Correction: An error introduced by the publisher OR the author(s) (and this will be indicated in the explanatory text) that affects the integrity of the scholarly record, the reputation of the authors, or the reputation of the journal. (A "correction" at this journal covers both items traditionally called a “corrigendum” or an “erratum”.)
• Retraction: Withdrawal of a published paper due to invalid results or conclusions. All authors of a paper must sign a retraction request, indicating the error and describing how it affects the paper’s conclusions. If authors are not in unanimous agreement in requesting a retraction, the pertinent Senior Editor will consult the Handling Editor(s) and, as necessary, external reviewers and apply the category of amendment that appears most appropriate, indicating dissenting authors in the text of the published amendment.
• Expression of Concern: While the publishing community’s opinion on the use of an Expression of Concern is still under discussion (please refer here for the latest information) the journal reserves the right to consider using it on a case-by-case basis for instances involving, but not limited to: 1) material but inconclusive evidence of research or publication misconduct, which may or may not be still under investigation; 2) evidence of unreliable findings but with no institution or other organization willing or able to investigate the case; 3) evidence of an error, or omission of pertinent information, in the article or in the linked open data/materials, that should be fixed but has not been due to author unwillingness or unresponsiveness. In most cases an Expression of Concern would lead to either a positive resolution (via a notice) OR a retraction.

Post-publication commentary 

The journal platform permits readers to leave comments on the publication page, via the Disqus service. Readers will need a Disqus account to leave comments. Comments may be moderated by the publisher. However, if they are non-offensive and relevant to the publication subject, comments will remain online without edit.

The journal platform also includes in-browser annotation and text highlighting options on full text formats via https://hypothes.is/. Readers will require an account to create annotations, and will have the option to make these publicly available, available to a group, or private.

Archiving Policy 

Journal content is discoverable and accessible through various indexing services. Content is also archived around the world to guarantee long-term availability.

The journal is or will be indexed by the field appropriate services:
CrossRef, JISC KB+, SHERPA RoMEO, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), EBSCOHost, and Google Scholar. In addition, the journal is available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises the Portico archive to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration. If the journal is not indexed by your preferred indexing service, please let us know by emailing support@ubiquitypress.com or alternatively by making an indexing request directly with the service.

Misconduct, Complaints, Appeals

Allegations of misconduct will be taken with utmost seriousness, regardless of whether those involved are internal or external to the journal, or whether the submission in question is pre- or post-publication. If an allegation of misconduct is made to the journal, it must be immediately passed on to the publisher, who will follow guidelines from the Committee  on Publication Ethics (COPE) on how to address the nature of the problem. Should the matter involve allegations against a member of the journal or publishing team, an independent and objective individual(s) may be sought to lead the investigation.

Should an author wish to lodge a complaint against an editorial decision or the editorial process in general they should first approach the Editor(s)-in-Chief of the journal, explaining their complaint and ask for a reasoned response. Should this not be forthcoming or inadequate, they should raise the matter with the publisher, who will investigate the nature of the complaint and act as arbiter on whether the complaint should be upheld and investigated further. This will follow guidelines set out by COPE.

Preprint Policy

The journal allows authors to deposit draft versions of their paper into a suitable preprint server, 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 presented during submission. This must include a link to the location of the preprint.
• 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 (see review policy).
• Should the submission be published, the authors are expected 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.

ORCID

The journal strongly recommends that all authors submitting a paper register an account with Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID). Registration provides a unique and persistent digital identifier for the account that enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published papers, ensuring that the correct author receives the correct credit for their work. As the ORCID remains the same throughout the lifetime of the account, changes of name, affiliation, or research area do not effect the discoverability of an author's past work and aid correspondence with colleagues.

The journal encourages all corresponding authors to include an ORCID within their submitting author data whilst co-authors are recommended to include one. ORCID numbers should be added to the author data upon submission and will be published alongside the submitted paper, should it be accepted.

Data Policy

If data has been generated in any research submitted to Media+Environment, the journal strongly encourages authors to make all data associated with their submission openly available, according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This should be linked to from a Data Accessibility Statement within the submitted paper, which will be made public upon publication. If data is not being made available with the journal publication, a statement from the author should be provided to explain why. Data obtained from other sources must be appropriately credited. When depositing data for a submission, the below should be considered:

• The repository the data is deposited in must be suitable for this subject and have a sustainability model.
• The data must be deposited under an open license that permits unrestricted access (e.g. CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses should only be used if a valid reason (e.g. legal) is present.
• The deposited data must include a version that is in an open, non-proprietary format.
• The deposited data must have been labelled in such a way that a 3rd party can make sense of it (e.g. sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file). 
• Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The identity of the research subject should be anonymised whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian). 
• A ‘Data Accessibility Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data accessibility, including the DOI linking to it. If the data is restricted in any way, the reasoning should be given. 

A list of data repositories is available at http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Data_repositories.

Section Policies