Scope and Open Access policy

Rhesis – Linguistics and Philology aims at publishing contributions in all subfields of functional linguistics which show a methodological orientation to the empirical verification of theories. It welcomes contributions in all empirically-oriented language studies with application to both classical and modern languages, and it devotes particular attention to theoretically-grounded studies in historical linguistics. It also welcomes philological studies focusing on either textual or cultural issues.

Rhesis – Literature welcomes contributions on both classical and modern literatures of the world, with particular attention to the critical edition of literary texts, intertextuality, and theory and criticism of literary genres. It features contributions on the interpretation of literary texts and on diverse cultural manifestations of literature studies and related disciplines.

Rhesis adheres to the BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative) definition of Open Access policy permitting “[…] any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”

Peer-review process

Rhesis uses a double-blind peer-review process to evaluate scientific manuscripts. When an article is submitted to the Journal, the Editorial board reviews it to ensure that it meets the Journal’s scope and standards, which usually takes about one week. If the manuscript is deemed suitable for peer-review, it is sent to two reviewers who are experts in the same field as the author. To ensure objectivity, both the reviewers and the author are kept anonymous from each other; the process ensures that reviewers are independent of the authors. Reviewers are required to declare any conflicts of interest. The reviewers usually have three to four weeks to complete their review and provide feedback to the editors and the authors. The feedback may include suggestions for revisions or improvements to the manuscript. Once the reviews are complete, the Editorial board carefully evaluates the feedback and makes a decision on whether to accept the manuscript for publication, request revisions from the authors, or reject the manuscript. If a manuscript is found to be unsuitable for publication in the journal, either because it does not meet the journal’s scope and standards or because of other reasons, it may be rejected by the Editors without being sent out for review by external experts (Desk rejection).

The peer-review process is managed through the OJS platform.

Deadlines

The call for papers is ongoing and has no deadline. Articles submitted to the Journal are organized into two sections (Linguistics and Philology and Literature) and will be published on the website as they are accepted, typeset, and finalized for inclusion in the current year’s volume. The yearly volume will close on December 31st of each year.

Commencing January 1st, 2024, submissions of essays and scientific studies for issue 15 (2024) are invited to the Rhesis Editorial Committee. This invitation remains valid throughout the entirety of 2024. Following the completion of the revision and layout process, each article will be published on the site. The annual closure of the issue is slated for December 31st. Articles submitted after October 30th, 2024, will be considered for the subsequent year's edition. The publication of the following year's issue will commence on January 1st, 2025, following the same procedural timeline.

License and fees

All content published in Rhesis is licensed under the CC BY-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives) International License, which permits others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. The authors of contributions retain the copyright, and proper credit must be given to them for any use of their work.

Rhesis does not charge any Article Processing Charges (APCs) or Article Submission Charges (ASCs).

Ethical code

Rhesis. International Journal of Linguistics, Philology and Literature is published by the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultural Heritage of the University of Cagliari, a public institution devoted to scientific research and teaching. The Department does not interfere with the Rhesis editors’ freedom of choice and activities, as long as their work is coherent with the scholarly mission of the Journal.

Rhesis is an open access journal, with a double-blind peer review inspired by the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors developed by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).

All parties involved in the Journal publication – editors, editorial board, reviewers, authors, and scientific committee – have to know and share the following ethical code.

Rhesis has no commercial purpose. Hence, the Journal’s editorial processes and the editors’ decisions are independent of any commercial consideration.

The editors and the editorial board work on a volunteer basis.

Rhesis aims at granting authors, readers, reviewers, and all other parties involved maximum transparency and complete and honest reports about its work.

Authors’ responsibilities

Originality and plagiarism 

Authors are committed to submit original and unpublished studies, to present appropriate contributions and, if necessary, to discuss them with the members of the editorial board.

Authors are also committed to provide all the correct references for their bibliographical sources and/or any other forms of contribution they have referred to or applied to their work.

Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate claims are against deontology and therefore unacceptable. 

Multiple, repetitive, or concurrent publications 

Authors cannot submit articles that have already been published elsewhere or are being screened by another journal. Parallel submission of the same paper to more than one journal is ethically incorrect and therefore unacceptable. 

Copyright 

Authors guarantee that their papers’ contents, including images or multimodal documents of any type, do not violate any existing copyright, and relieve the publisher from any responsibility. 

Authors guarantee that their papers’ contents are not libellous or detrimental to any other person’s moral or economic rights.  

Authorship

Authorship has to be correctly assigned and all those who have given a meaningful contribution to the organisation, realisation, and interpretation of the research at the basis of the article have to be cited as co-authors. If any other person has taken a significant part in some stages of the research activity, this must be explicitly recognised. 

In case of co-authoring, the author submitting the text to Rhesis has to declare all the other co-authors’ names correctly, having had their approval for the final version of the article as well as their consent for the publication. 

Mistakes and publications

When authors identify any inaccuracy or meaningful mistake in one of their articles, they have to promptly notify the editorial board and provide all the necessary information to carry out any correction.  

Reviewers’ responsibilities

Contribution to the editorial decision 

The double-blind peer review is a process supporting the editorial board in their decisions on the submitted articles. It aims at contributing to the improvement of the authors’ papers. Any chosen reviewer has to evaluate the manuscript beyond any personal influences (see “Conflict of interest” below), with the sole purpose of enhancing research and the scientific dissemination of the results.

Deadlines

Any chosen reviewer who might not feel suitable to the proposed task or might not be able to carry out the reading within the expected time has to inform the editorial board about it as soon as possible. 

Privacy

Every article to be reviewed has to be considered confidential. Therefore, manuscripts cannot be discussed with anyone outside the editorial board without explicit authorization. 

Objectivity 

The review has to be undertaken objectively. Reviewers have to properly motivate their assessment according to a standardized form provided by the editorial board.

Conflict of interest and motivation

Information or data resulting from the peer review has to be considered confidential and cannot be used for any personal purpose. Reviewers are required not to accept reading articles that might cause a conflict of interest. 

Editors’ responsibilities

Publications and related decisions

The editorial board of Rhesis agree to evaluate, read, and check the contributions submitted to the Journal and ensure that contributions follow the Journal’s guidelines. Members of the editorial board organize and use peer-review processes fairly and wisely and guarantee anonymity in the phase of external review adopting the criteria of a double-blind peer review. When the opinions of the reviewers are conflicting, the editorial board involve additional reviewers in the evaluation process. Rhesis applies the same peer-review process, anonymous and objective, to the contributions submitted for publication by the editorial staff. Final editorial decisions are clearly communicated to authors. If a paper is rejected, editors welcome appeals from its author. Editors, however, are not obliged to overturn their decision.

Suitability

The editorial board evaluate the intellectual content of the submitted articles independently from the authors’ gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, citizenship, or political orientation.  

Privacy

Any member of the editorial board is committed not to reveal any information about the submitted articles to people other than the author, the reviewers, and other members of the editorial board. 

Publications and mistakes

The editorial board are committed to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies if necessary. 

Divulgation and conflicts of interest 

The editorial board are committed not to use the contents of a submitted article in a research of their own without the author’s written consent. 

Responsibilities of the scientific committee

The Journal’s scientific committee must verify the dedication to the Journal’s mission with respect to the proposed contributions and must ensure that the Journal’s mission is to disseminate knowledge and the results of scientific research. The committee also agree to report possible conflicts of interest in the selection, evaluation, and proposal of submissions and to collaborate with the editorial board and the editor-in-chief to guarantee a fair evaluation process, free from any personal conflicts.

Responsibilities of the editor-in-chief’s

The editor-in-chief undertakes to exercise their functions fairly and objectively and to ensure that the Journal and its staff do not discriminate against authors based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, citizenship, or political orientation. 

The editor-in-chief may reject a paper without peer review when it is deemed unsuitable for the Journal’s readers, in contrast with the Journal’s mission, or because of its mediocre quality. This decision is made in a fair and unbiased way, and the criteria used to make this decision are made transparent to the author.

Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving Sherpa Romeo

Archiving

Rhesis is part of the LOCKSS programme and archives its content for permanent preservation in a distributed system managed by research libraries worldwide.

lockss

Ranking and indexing

Ranking

Indexing

 

Privacy Declaration

Names and email addresses included on the Journal's website will be used exclusively for the stated purposes and will not be made available for any other use. As for data-protection regulations, see Unica privacy statement.