Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement requirement (pdf)
Declaration of compliance with publication ethics and of unacceptable publication practices
Verba Theologica is committed to ensuring ethics in the publication and quality of the articles. Authors, publishers, editors, and reviewers are expected to comply with standards of ethical behavior.
Duties of authors
Authors should present an objective scholarly discussion on the importance of research work. Deceptive or intentionally inaccurate statements represent unethical behavior and are unacceptable. Research articles should be objective, comprehensive and accurate. Authors should ensure that their contributions are original works and the citations of other authors are clearly stated. Verba Theologica is fully committed to preventing the publication of documents that reveal research flaws. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes serious unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. The journal is also open for publication of corrections and clarifications if necessary.
The simultaneous submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal is unethical and unacceptable. Authors may not submit articles containing the same research to more than one journal. The executive editor of the journal should ensure that all members of the editorial board agree fully when accepting the final version of the article for publication.
Duties of editors
The editor evaluates the submitted manuscripts objectively and solely on the basis of their scholarly quality. In the case of complaints about violation of publication ethics and conflict of interest, the editor will choose a procedure that will comply with the regulations set out in this document. The editor is obliged to allow the author to respond to any objections and to keep the documentation related to the complaint.
Duties of reviewers
Reviewers are required to maintain the anonymity of the review process. Any manuscripts accepted for review shall be treated as confidential. All information obtained in the review process is also confidential and may not be used for purposes other than the preparation of the review opinion. Reviewers should notify the editor of a text that has been previously published or is significantly similar in content to any work that has already been published.
Reviewers are required to maintain objectivity when reviewing the manuscript and to formulate the conclusions clearly so that authors can use them to correct the paper. In the case of a conflict of interest, the reviewer is obliged to inform the editor of this fact and he / she is obliged to replace it with another reviewer.
Reporting and investigating unethical behavior
Anyone can alert the editor and publisher to unethical behavior in publication process. When reporting such conduct, the informer must provide the editor or publisher with sufficient information and evidence of a transgression of publishing ethics. The editor and the publisher will treat each such report equally seriously. If the editor or publisher obtains sufficient evidence of unethical conduct, he will ask the author for the necessary explanation. If there is a serious violation of ethical standards, the editorial office shall immediately return to the author a contribution that violated the ethics of publishing.
Peer-review process
The editorial board will first examine each submitted paper. Papers that do not meet the formal requirements and are clearly not related to the journal's professional focus, or that violate the ethics of publishing, will be immediately returned for correction or rejected. The editorial board immediately informs the author of the rejection. Papers that meet formal and content criteria then go through an anonymous review process.
The editorial board will submit a paper to at least two reviewers for anonymous review. The review procedure is mutually anonymous, i.e. anonymity of the author and reviewers is guaranteed. If reviewers have serious reservations about both the content and the text, the author must correct it.
The editorial board does not charge any fees for acceptance and review.
Periodicity of the journal
Verba Theologica is published twice a year. It is not monothematic. It accepts original, scholarly papers with the stated content and reviews of current academic publications (at: verba@ku.sk). The deadline for submissions is always 28 February and 30 September.
Copyright, access and archiving
Verba Theologica is an open access journal. All issues are available online free of charge in the archive at the verba.ktfke.sk website. A printed edition can be ordered from the magazine's Executive Editor. To the author of the article published in the magazine are sent by the editorial office two author's prints free of charge. In the case that the magazine is no longer published by the publisher, the publisher undertakes to keep a complete archive of each issue on its official website.
Declaration of authorship and transfer of copyright
If the author's contribution has been accepted for publication in the review process, the author is obliged to confirm the Declaration of Authorship and Copyright Transfer before it is published. In the declaration, the author transfers all copyrights related to the published contribution to the publisher, thus enabling the editorial office to reproduce, store in the search system or distribute the published contribution in any form and by any means (electronically, mechanically, copying, recording, scanning, etc.) further written consent of the author.
