Peer-review

Acta Botanica Croatica is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. Once your paper has been assessed for suitability by the Editor-in-Chief and Section Editor, it will then be single blind peer reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees. Only manuscripts that meet the scientific and journal technical criteria  will be sent to the review process.

Plagiarism

Please note that the journal uses software to screen for plagiarism. Acta Botanica Croatica participates in an initiative by CrossRef (http:// www.crossref.org) to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism in scientific publications. This initiative is known as Crossref Similarity Check and provides its members a service to screen received content for originality against a vast database of relevant published material.

Acta Botanica Croatica Article Workflow

This is a step-by-step guide to the submission, review and publication process in Acta Botanica Croatica. Submissions are possible only through official Acta Botanica Croatica web page. Registration and login are required to submit the manuscript on-line. For submission, the author fills in the mandatory boxes, acknowledges the copyright statement, uploads all manuscript files (article text, illustrations - figures and/or tables, and supplemental materials if they exist), uploads the cover letter and adds the name, surname, e-mail address, country, affiliation and role of each co-author. Upon submission, a Technical Editor checks whether the submission is complete and assigns the Editor in Chief.

Manuscripts that meet the scientific and journal technical criteria will be sent to the prereview process and screened for plagiarism by CrossRef (http:// www.crossref.org). A technical editor screens the received article content for originality using the Crossref Similarity Check software which compares the manuscript content with a vast database of relevant published material. The technical editor then informs the Editor in-Chief about manuscript originality. The Editor in-Chief decides whether to decline or send the submitted article to review. For further article processing the Editor in Chief assigns a Section Editor, who assigns the Reviewers. At least two Reviewers process each article. Peer review is a volunteer work that requires exceptional involvement of a highly specialized expert in field, and sometimes finding an appropriate reviewer takes time. Though the authors could suggest the Reviewers, the peer review process is single blind and the author does not know who the reviewers are. During revision process the Section Editor communicates with Reviewers and forwards the information regarding revision to the corresponding author.

Upon acceptance of the Reviewer to revise the article, the Reviewer has three weeks to finish the revision and give opinion about the article. Each Reviewer fills out the Acta Botanica Croatica review sheet, adds comments in submitted article text and sets a recommendation about further processing of the submission.

Depending on the reviewers’ recommendations, the Section Editor engages an additional reviewer if needed (opposing reviewer opinions), proceeds with review process by communicating with authors about article improvements (minor and major revision), and finally advises the Editor in Chief about revised article (decline, or acceptance of revised article version). Only Editor in Chief can accept or decline the article.

Upon acceptance, the article is proofread by an English language expert, all references are checked and corrected (if necessary), the quality of figures and tables is additionally checked, and Ahead of print article file is prepared by Technical Editor in Chief. Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number is assigned and registered, and Ahead of print article is published online by Managing Editor. Final article PDF file for printing, XML article file, and PDF supplementary file(s) are prepared and the article is published in form of hard copy and online (1st April, 1st October) at HRČAK and ABC webpage. Before publication of “Final Article”, the corresponding author is asked to approve the version prepared for publication. Supplementary article materials are available only online.