Journal policy

Политика часописа

The journal Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA publishes original papers that have not been published previously. The papers submitted can belong to one of the following categories: original research paper, scientific review paper, scientific critique or debate, review or scientific bibliography. Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA is an Open Access journal. Publication in the journal Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA is free of charge.

The papers should cover topics in the areas of ethnology and anthropology, and related social sciences and humanities.

Contributions to journal may be submitted in Serbian and related languages, and in English. Papers in Serbian are published in Cyrillic script.

All the journal issues (three) published in a year form one volume. The јournal also publishes special issues, with particular themes and visiting editors.

Editorial responsibilities

The editor-in-chief (chief editor) is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA will be published. The editor is guided by the policies of the journal’s Editorial Board and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Editors must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. If an еditor feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the paper shall be made by the Editorial Board. Since the identity of the authors and reviewers is mutually unknown, the еditor is obliged to guarantee their anonymity.

Editors shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor’s own research without the express written consent of the author.

Authors' responsibilities 

Authors warrant that their manuscript is their original work that it has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The аuthors also warrant that the manuscript is not and will not be published elsewhere (after the publication in Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA) in any language without the consent of the copyright holder.

Authors warrant that the rights of third parties will not be violated, and that the publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions, the validity of the experimental results and must make sure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the data public.

Authors wishing to include images, photographs or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s) and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Authors must make sure that all only contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that papers submitted to Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA are written with ethical standards in mind and that they not contain plagiarism. Authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of others.

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal еditor or publisher and cooperate with the еditor to retract or correct the paper.

Peer review

The submitted papers are subject to a peer review process. The purpose of peer review is to assists the еditor and Editorial Board in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author it may also assist the author in improving the paper. All submitted papers undergo a reviewing process by two expert reviewers appointed by the Editorial Board. In the event of a paper receiving one positive and one negative review, the Editorial Board appoints a third reviewer. Authors who receive conditionally positive reviews are required to take into account the comments made by the reviewers, or, if they do not wish to do so, they can withdraw their submissions. The author is required to send the amended paper to the Journal within fifteen days after he/she has received the reviews. The reviewer should send the finished review to the Editorial Board within three weeks.

The choice of reviewers is at the editors’ and the Editorial Board’s discretion. The reviewers must be knowledgeable about the subject area of the manuscript; they must not be from the authors’ own institution and they should not have recent joint publications with any of the authors.

Reviewers must not have conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the еditor without delay.

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the еditor without delay.

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. In the main review phase, the еditor sends submitted papers to two experts in the field. The reviewers’ evaluation form contains a checklist in order to help referees cover all aspects that can decide the fate of a submission. In the final section of the evaluation form, the reviewers must include observations and suggestions aimed at improving the submitted manuscript; these are sent to authors, without the names of the reviewers. The secretary of the Editorial Board sends the reviewers’ evaluation form to reviewers.

The reviewers of a paper act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities. If the decisions of the two reviewers are not the same (accept/reject), the еditor may assign additional reviewers.

The еditorial team shall ensure reasonable quality control for the reviews. With respect to reviewers whose reviews are convincingly questioned by authors, special attention will be paid to ensure that the reviews are objective and high in academic standard. When there is any doubt with regard to the objectivity of the reviews or quality of the review, additional reviewers will be assigned.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, where someone assumes another’s ideas, words, or other creative expression as one’s own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism may constitute the following:

• Word for word, or almost word for word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author’s work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);
• Copying photographs, images or tables from someone else’s paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism.

Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected.

If an attempt at plagiarism is found in a published paper, the author is required to publish a written apology to the authors of the original paper, and further collaboration with the authors of plagiarized papers will be terminated.

Retraction Policy

Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as long as it is possible. However, very occasionally, circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistake while preserving the integrity of science; it is not to punish the author.

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA: in the electronic version of the retraction note, a link is made to the original article. In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged; save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

Open Access Policy

Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA is an Open Access Journal. All articles can be downloaded free of charge and used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which allows authors and users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the article. The CC BY-SA 4.0 license permits non-commercial and commercial re-use of an open access article under the same license conditions, as long as the author is properly attributed.

The journal does not charge APC (Article Processing Charge).

Self-archiving Policy

The journal Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA allows authors to deposit Author’s Post-print (accepted version) and Publisher’s version/PDF in an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, or to publish it on Author’s personal website and departmental website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), at any time after publication, according to the mentioned license. Publisher copyright and source must be acknowledged and a link must be made to the article’s DOI.

Authors grant to the Publisher the following rights to the manuscript, including any supplemental material, and any parts, extracts or elements thereof:

• the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript in printed form, including print-on-demand;
• the right to produce prepublications, reprints, and special editions of the Manuscript;
• the right to translate the Manuscript into other languages;
• the right to reproduce the Manuscript using photomechanical or similar means including, but not limited to photocopy, and the right to distribute these reproductions;
• the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript electronically or optically on any and all data carriers or storage media – especially in machine readable/digitalized form on data carriers such as hard drive, CD-Rom, DVD, Bluray Disc (BD), Mini-Disk, data tape – and the right to reproduce and distribute the Article via these data carriers;
• the right to store the Manuscript in databases, including online databases, and the right of transmission of the Manuscript in all technical systems and modes;
• the right to make the Manuscript available to the public or to closed user groups on individual demand, for use on monitors or other readers (including e-books), and in printable form for the user, either via the internet, other online services, or via internal or external networks.

Editorial Board 

Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA