About the Journal

Focus and Scope

IMG JOURNAL is an interdisciplinary scientific journal on image, imagery and imagination, and promotes the interchange between disciplines on monographic topics, mainly — but not only — related to the domain of visual science, graphic science, psychological and pedagogical sciences.

The journal encourages the publication of widely developed in-depth and experimental studies, but also theoretical studies, comprehensive reviews on specific topics and position papers.

Peer Review Process

IMG JOURNAL uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not reveal or indicate their identity.

The editors — guest editors and editors-in-chief — will decide whether the submission is eligible for review. As part of the initial quality assessment, each article will undergo plagiarism detection through iThenticate. After this formal assessment, if positive, the submission will be sent to two external referees.

Based on the review reports the editors will make one of the following decisions:

Rejected. The submission is not accepted. In this case, a written explanation will be provided.
Major revision. In this case, the author will have the opportunity to re-submit the paper, taking into account the comments of the referees and the editor.
Minor revision. In this case, the author is required to make non-substantial changes or additions of clarification, taking into account the comments of the referees and the editor.
Accepted. The submission is accepted, with the possibility of requesting corrections of typos or minor errors in the application of the editorial guidelines.

The full review process generally takes no more than two months from the submission date. Editorial, Interviews and Book Reviews will not be peer reviewed.

Every year the list of reviewers of the previous two issues will be published.

Publication Frequency

The journal publish an issue every six months, in autumn and in the spring.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

It releases its articles under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This license allows anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contributions. The works must be properly attributed to its author(s). It is not necessary to ask further permissions both to author(s) or journal board, although you are kindly requested to inform the journal for every reuse of the papers.

Authors who publish on this journal maintain the copyrights.

The journal has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees.

Code of Conduct

The following statement is inspired by COPE Code of Conduct:
http://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors.pdf

Duties for the Editors

Editors of IMG Journal are responsible for the selection process and the publication of articles submitted to IMG JOURNAL. They will take all reasonable steps to ensure the quality of the published material and to ensure a fair, unbiased and timely peer review process. Authors have the right to have manuscripts evaluated for their intellectual contents, without discrimination on grounds of their gender, sexual orientation, political or religious beliefs, ethnic or geographical origin.

The peer review process, as described in the journal policies, will be followed by Editors with accuracy. They will keep track of the process and will justify any important deviation of it.

The decision of the Editors as to accept or reject a paper for publication in the journal is based on subject relevance and originality, and is guided by the review of suitably qualified Reviewers. Editors will ensure that appropriate and qualified Reviewers are selected for each submission, and will send to Authors the entirety of their comments — unless their content is offensive.

The Editorial Team adopts a work-flow that ensure that material submitted to the Journal remains confidential while under review. Confidentiality of individual information obtained in the course of research or professional interactions must be guaranteed.

The Editorial Team provides guidance to Authors that encourage accuracy, completeness and clarity of research reporting, including technical editing and the use of appropriate guidelines and flowcharts.

Editors will manage their competing interests as well as those of the staff, Reviewers, and Authors.

Editors have a process for handling submissions from the Editors and members of the Editorial Team to ensure unbiased review and the blindness of the peer-review process.

Editors decision may be constrained by legal requirements regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Editors ensure that contents are published on a timely basis, following the stated frequency. Editors take all reasonable steps to guarantee that the published material is securely preserved and all articles are published in open access, freely available to anyone. Permanent identifiers as DOI and an archiving policy guarantee tracking and preservation of articles in the long term.

Duties for Authors

Author(s) should understand and scrupulously uphold high standards for ethical behaviour in the conduct of research, particularly in relation to the verification and truthful reporting of data, the granting of proper credit, and referencing of the work of others in publication. Plagiarism of another’s work is a form of theft and constitutes serious misconduct.

In publication it is essential that each co-author contributes significantly to the research reported and openly accepts joint responsibility for the work. If these conditions cannot be met, the person should not be included as an author. The roles and editing by each author should be declared in the acknowledgements

Simultaneous submissions of an article describing the same research to more than one publication constitutes misconduct because it wastes editorial and referees’ time for the author’s own purposes. Similarly, publishing the same results in more than one primary research journal is a form of misconduct and is not acceptable. Exceptions are made by some journals for previous publication in conference proceedings. At submission an author is bound to disclose any prior appearance of the work so that the journal may make an informed decision about whether to accept it for peer review.

Authors must declare all the financial and non-financial support for their research. Authors must declare any potential competing interest and must comply with the peer-review process by submitting a properly anonymized manuscript.

Authors are asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review. Authors are encouraged to deposit the underlying data in a public or institutional data repository for public accessibility and long-term preservation. Authors are also asked to provide full citation and a link to the deposited underlying data in the accepted manuscript. In case the underlying data cannot be shared on account of ethical or commercial restrictions, Authors should be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication and provide a suitable data availability statement.

Authors are asked to follow the Authors Guidelines published by the Journal, therefore ensuring accuracy, completeness and clarity of research reporting, including technical and linguistic editing.

Authors have the responsibility to notify promptly the Editor if a significant error in their articles, both published and unpublished, is identified. Authors will cooperate with Editors in case any issue is raised with their articles.

Duties for Reviewers

Reviewers are provided guidance on everything that is expected of them including the need to handle submitted material in confidence.

Reviewers are required to disclose any potential competing interests before agreeing to review a submission.

Reviewers are required to provide authors with critical and constructive comments, substantiated by arguments and relevant literature. More importantly, reviewers must not provide unclear, unfair and biased statements. They must not unjustly obstruct publication or breach confidentiality, for personal purposes.

Reviewers are encouraged to comment on the originality of submissions and to be alert to redundant publications and plagiarism. They will alert Editors regarding intellectual property issues and plagiarism and work to handle potential breaches of intellectual property laws and conventions.

Reviewers should help identifying relevant published work that has not been cited by the Authors.

Handling of errors and misconducts

Editors have a duty to act promptly in case of errors and misconducts, both proven and alleged. This duty extends to both published and unpublished papers. In case such as errors in articles or in the publication process, fraudulent publication or plagiarism, appropriate steps will be taken, following the recommendations, guidelines and flowcharts from COPE. Corrections will happen with due prominence, including the publication of an erratum (errors from the publication process), corrigendum (errors from the Author(s)) or, in the most severe cases, the retraction of the affected work.

Publisher

Dipartimento di Scienze Dell’Educazione «Giovanni Maria Bertin»
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Via Filippo Re, 6
40126 - Bologna (Italy)

Archiving Policy

The University of Bologna has an archival arrangement with the National Central Libraries of Florence and Rome within the national project Magazzini Digitali.
http://www.depositolegale.it/editori-aderenti/