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Editorial Policies

Peer Review Process

Only manuscripts submitted via the online portal will be considered for peer review. The manuscripts submitted are initially assessed initially by the Co Editors and a decision made regarding further processing. Primary Editorial Rejection is undertaken for articles manuscripts that are found to be incomplete based on submission requirements (link to author guidelines) not suitable for publication in the journal or those that fall outside the scope of the journal. 

If online submissions are incomplete, authors may be contacted by the editorial team requesting completion of submission requirements at the editors’ discretion.
Once a decision is made to process the article, it is assigned to a Section Editor, with expertise in the respective field of study. Two peer reviewers are assigned by the Editors and Section editors. The peer review process is double-blinded. When deemed necessary, the article would be sent to a separate Specialist Reviewer.
If and when there is no agreement among the reviewers, the manuscript would be sent to another independent reviewer.
Comments from peer reviewers are examined by the Section editor and a decision of Accept/ Requires revision/ or Reject is made based on the recommendations of the reviewers and authors are informed by email.  We attempt to make this process as fast as possible and try to get a decision back to authors within 6 weeks.
If the decision is ‘Requires revision’, authors are then given a period of 2 weeks to revised and / or rebut the reviewer comments and resubmit the revised manuscript. The revised manuscript will be evaluated by the Section editor and Editors and a final decision will be made on acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. If  a 2nd round of peer review is deemed necessary, the revised manuscript will be reassigned to the original peer reviewers or to new reviewers and the process will begin again until a final decision is reached. The total time from submission to final decision is approximately 3 to 4 months.  All accepted manuscripts will be published in the next issue of the SLJM to be published. (publication frequency)
All communications with authors will be via email through the journal management system or the journal email address (sljmksm@gmail.com  If there is no response from the authors, a reminder will be sent giving the author another fortnight (two weeks) to respond. If there is no response by that deadline, the article will be rejected and archived.
Any manuscripts written and submitted by the Co Editors, Assistant Editors, Section editors or a Member or Members of the Editorial Board, or manuscripts where family members of such editors or members are authors, will be reviewed independently without any participation of the author/s or relative concerned. In such circumstances, two or more independent external reviewers are recruited. The authors do not take part in any of the decision making processes and are always requested to leave the discussion site whenever such processes take place.

Publication decisions

The Co Editors are responsible for the final decision on which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. They are guided by the Section editors and Editorial Board and the assessments made by the reviewers. The final decisions are also balanced by constraints such as legal requirements including potential libel issues, copyright infringements and plagiarism.

Section Policies