Suitable submissions

When an article is submitted to Glossa Contact, the Editors-in-Chief first decide whether the focus and scope of the submission is suitable for the journal. If the submission is deemed unsuitable, the author will be informed within a week. If the submission is in line with Glossa Contact’s focus and scope, the Editors-in-Chief will assign one of the Editors to act as Handling Editor for the submission. The Handling Editor then forms a Handling Editorial team, taking into account the range of expertise required to evaluate the submission and advise the authors. The role of the Handling Editor within the Team is to ease coordination (rather than a Solomonic role).

Only unpublished articles can be submitted. Although the journal is happy to accept submissions of papers that have been uploaded onto preprint servers or personal websites, presented at conferences, or disseminated through other informal communication channels, the submitted papers cannot have been peer-reviewed before, carry an ISBN number, and the authors must have retained copyright; otherwise the submission is considered a prior publication. Authors are expected to create a link from any prior posting of their paper to the final published version in Glossa Contact, if possible. Submissions that were electronically available before submitting to Glossa Contact do raise concerns about the anonymity of the reviewing process, so the authors can alert the editors so that the article can be treated with special care. 

If a manuscript has previously been submitted elsewhere, the editors of Glossa Contact would like to request that authors provide information about the previous reviewing process and its outcome. This provides an opportunity for authors to detail how subsequent revisions have taken into account previous reviews, and why certain reviewer comments were not taken into account. Information about the authors' previous reviewing experience with the manuscript is to the authors’ advantage since it could help the editors select more appropriate reviewers. Another reason Glossa Contact has this policy is to discourage authors from simply resubmitting papers to different journals without taking into account reasonable requests from previous rounds of reviewing elsewhere. Such a situation often comes to light when reviewers inform the editors that they have reviewed the paper for a different journal and no changes were made in the new submission to Glossa Contact. The editors believe this is a waste of precious reviewing resources. 

All submissions are automatically checked with plagiarism software.

The reviewing process

See the overview of the review process, the suggested structure of the review, and further guidelines for reviewers, as well as this page in case you would like to become a reviewer.

Editorial decisions and revisions

After the review, the Handling Editorial Team makes a single, joint editorial decision, striving for consensus. The Handling Editorial Team takes into account the reviewers' recommendations and remarks and provides the authors with a justified synthetic assessment and, where applicable, also with advice regarding possible improvements to  the manuscript. Glossa Contact strives to reach timely initial editorial decisions. The editorial decision is communicated to the author(s), and consists of the Handling Editorial Team’s general decision letter, which includes specific recommendations to the authors; and all received comments to the authors, both by the external reviewers as well as the Handling Editorial Team’s members. 

If the editorial decision is “resubmit for review”, ”revisions required”, or “accept submission”, authors are asked to provide a detailed document explaining how their revised submission has taken the comments into account; and/or a file with track changes / changes highlighted in a different color, and notes explaining the implementation of requests and reaction to comments. This document will be read both by the reviewers (in the case of “resubmit for review”) and the Handling Editorial Team. The revised version should ideally be resubmitted within 10 weeks of the editorial decision having been made, but this is negotiable. In the case of “resubmit for review”, the revised version and the document detailing the changes will be sent to the initial reviewers, unless the author can demonstrate that a reviewer was biased against the paper. Additional reviewers may also be invited at this point, if the initial reviewer is unavailable or at the discretion of the Handling Editorial Team. In principle (conditionally) accepted submissions are not sent out for external review again once the author submits the revised version. The Handling Editorial Team makes an editorial decision based on the revised paper and the authors’ reply. However, the Handling Editorial Team may still contact one or more reviewers regarding specific questions, or even initiate a full new cycle of review if the paper was changed so substantively that the previous round's assessment becomes insufficient. Generally, Glossa Contact will allow for a maximum of two rounds of revisions for a paper.