Visions for Sustainability is committed to a policy of publishing integrity in both theoretical and research publications, so as to safeguard honesty and reliability in all aspects of the papers published, promote meticulous attention, thoroughness, and excellence in scientific research practice, ensure transparency and openness in all communication processes and guarantee care and respect for all participants and subjects. Our editorial team constantly monitors all these aspects in all dealings with authors in order to maintain the standards envisaged by our ethical code. We follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) concerning how to investigate and deal with acts of misconduct, thereby contributing to the creation of a culture of publication integrity.

Peer Review and Publication Process

The publication process follows a procedure deigned to ensure transparency in each stage.

On receipt of a manuscript, the editors-in-chief send an e-mail of confirmation to the corresponding author within 5 working days. If authors do not receive this confirmation, they should contact the editors-in-chief immediately.

The proposal is initially examined by the editors-in-chief to ensure it is suitable for consideration before proceeding to the peer review process.

Peer review. The paper is peer-reviewed by three reviewers: a member of the editorial team and two external reviewers who are subject specialists. Support is provided to reviewers to ensure scrupulous, fair and effective peer reviewing and feedback that is beneficial and constructive for authors. We guarantee that a review process is completed within 2 months.

Notification of the outcome of the review and any request for revision are sent by e-mail. Requests for revision are detailed and supportive for authors.

The authors revise the paper and submit the final version. The editors-in-chief guarantee that the accepted version will be published online as “in press” within 3 weeks after the submission of the final version. The versions defined as “in press” will have their specific DOI and they can thus be used for references before final publication.

An e-journal version in PDF is available for download free of charge on the journal’s webpage. 

Authorship

Visions for Sustainability requires authors to guarantee accountability for their contributions to a study. Authors are expected to:

- have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, been responsible for the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data, or have drafted the work or substantively revised it;

- have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author's contribution to the study);

- have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author's own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature;

- have ensured appropriate attribution and citation when paraphrasing and summarizing the work of others and reuse from an author’s previous research publications.

The corresponding author has the authority to act on behalf of all co-authors, and we expect the corresponding author to confirm this at the beginning of the publication process.

Competing Interests

To ensure that any paper published is free from undue influence and in the general interests of transparency, Visions for Sustainability requires authors to declare any competing financial and/or non-financial interests in relation to the work described. We will not publish any work for which competing interests might undermine the objectivity, integrity and value of a publication, through a potential influence on the judgements and actions of authors with regard to objective data presentation, analysis and interpretation. The corresponding author is responsible for submitting a competing interests' statement on behalf of all authors of the paper.

Correction and retraction policy

Visions for Sustainability considers corrections, expressions of concern or retractions in line with COPE’s Retraction Guidelines and recognizes its responsibility to correct errors and retract any inaccurate, misleading or fraudulent results that may emerge in any of its issues. Readers' responses and criticisms of papers will be published if the author provides adequate evidence that a part of the original paper was incorrect or can be legitimately contested. Refutations are peer-reviewed, and where possible they will be sent to the same referees who reviewed the original paper. A copy will also be sent to the corresponding author of the original paper for signed comments. The published refutation, as well as the eventual author reply or retraction, are linked online to the original paper.