PUBLICATION POLICY

International Journal Polytechnic is an international open-access scientific journal dedicated to publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed original research and review papers in the field of technological development, within the educational-scientific field of technical-technological sciences and related interdisciplinary areas.

The journal covers research in the fields of biotechnology, agriculture and food technologies, electrical engineering, electronics, telecommunications and information technologies, as well as mechanical engineering, production engineering and industrial software.

Particular attention is given to fundamental, applied, and developmental research that contributes to the advancement of scientific knowledge, the development of new technologies, and the application of innovative solutions in industry, agriculture, education, and society.

Priority is given to original scientific papers based on contemporary experimental, analytical, numerical, and computational methods. Interdisciplinary papers presenting significant results, introducing innovative approaches, and addressing important issues of technological development, digitalization, automation, sustainability, and efficient resource use are especially welcome.

All submitted manuscripts undergo an initial editorial assessment and a double-blind peer review process conducted by at least two independent reviewers. This process ensures the scientific quality, originality, methodological soundness, and relevance of the published results.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Editorial responsibilities

The Editorial Board is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal will be published. The decisions are made based exclusively on the manuscript’s merit. They must be free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias. When making decisions, the Editorial Board is also guided by the editorial policy and legal provisions relating to defamation, copyright infringement, and plagiarism.

Members of the Editorial Board, including the Editor-in-Chief, must hold no conflict of interest concerning the articles they consider for publication. Members who feel they might be perceived as being involved in such a conflict do not participate in the decision process for a particular manuscript.

The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential. Information and ideas contained in unpublished materials must not be used for personal gain without the written consent of the authors.

Editors and the editorial staff shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the authors/reviewers remain anonymous during and after the evaluation process in accordance with the type of reviewing in use.

Authors’ responsibilities

Authors warrant that their manuscripts are their original works, that they have not been published before, and that they are not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Parallel submission of the same paper to another journal constitutes misconduct and eliminates the manuscript from further consideration. The work that has already been published elsewhere cannot be reprinted in the International Journal Polytechnic.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions. The authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of third parties.

Authors must make sure that their author team listed in the manuscript includes all and only those authors who have significantly contributed to the submitted manuscript. If persons other than authors were involved in important aspects of the research project and the preparation of the manuscript, their contribution should be acknowledged in a footnote or the Acknowledgments section.

It is the responsibility of the authors to specify the title and code label of the research project within which the work was created, as well as the full title of the funding institution. In case a submitted manuscript has been presented at a conference in the form of an oral presentation (under the same or similar title), detailed information about the conference shall be provided in the same place.

Authors are required to properly cite sources that have significantly influenced their research and their manuscript. Parts of the manuscript, including text, equations, pictures, and tables that are taken verbatim from other works, must be clearly marked, e.g., by quotation marks accompanied by their location in the original document (page number), or, if more extensive, given in a separate paragraph.

Full references of each quotation (in-text citation) must be listed in a separate section (Literature or References) uniformly, according to the citation style used by the journal. The references section should list only quoted/cited sources and not all sources used for the preparation of a manuscript.

When authors discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published work, it is their obligation to promptly notify the Editor-in-Chief (or publisher) and cooperate with him/her to retract or correct the paper.

Authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might have influenced the presented results or their interpretation.

By submitting a manuscript, the authors agree to abide by the Editorial Policies of the International Journal Polytechnic.

Reviewers’ responsibilities

Reviewers are required to provide a qualified and timely assessment of the scholarly merits of the manuscript. The reviewer takes special care of the real contribution and originality of the manuscript. The review must be fully objective. The judgment of the reviewers must be clear and substantiated by arguments.

The reviewers assess the manuscript for compliance with the profile of the journal, the relevance of the investigated topic and applied methods, the scientific relevance of information presented in the manuscript, the presentation style, and scholarly apparatus. The review has a standard format.

The reviewer must not be in conflict of interest with the authors or funders of the research. If such a conflict exists, the reviewer is obliged to promptly notify the Editor-in-Chief. The reviewer shall not accept for review papers beyond the field of his/her full competence.

Reviewers should alert the Editor-in-Chief to any well-founded suspicions or knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been considered in the manuscript. They may recommend specific references for citation, but shall not require the citation of papers published in the International Journal Polytechnic, or their own papers, unless it is justified.

The reviewers are expected to improve the quality of the manuscript through their suggestions. If they recommend correction of the manuscript before publication, they are obliged to specify the manner in which this can be achieved.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors.

PUBLISHING ETHICS

Dealing with unethical behaviour

Anyone may inform the Editor-in-Chief/Editorial Board at any time of suspected unethical behaviour or any type of misconduct by giving the necessary credible information/evidence to start an investigation.

  • The Editor-in-Chief decides the initiation of an investigation.
  • During an investigation, any evidence should be treated as confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in the process.
  • The accused will always be given the chance to respond to any charges made against them.
  • If it is judged at the end of the investigation that misconduct has occurred, then it will be classified as either minor or serious.

Minor misconduct (with no influence on the integrity of the paper and the journal, for example, when it comes to misunderstanding or wrong application of publishing standards) will be dealt with directly with authors and reviewers without involving any other parties. Outcomes include:

  • Sending a warning letter to authors and/or reviewers.
  • Publishing a correction of a paper, e.g., when sources properly quoted in the text are omitted from the reference list.
  • Publishing an erratum, e.g., if the error was made by the editorial staff.

In the case of major misconduct, the Editorial Board may adopt different measures:

  • Publication of a formal announcement or editorial describing the misconduct.
  • Informing the author’s/reviewer’s affiliating institution.
  • The formal, announced retraction of publications from the journal in accordance with the Retraction Policy.
  • A ban on submissions from an individual for a defined period.
  • Referring a case to a professional organization or legal authority for further investigation and action.

The above actions may be taken separately or jointly. If necessary, in the process of resolving the case, relevant expert organizations, bodies, or individuals may be consulted.

When dealing with unethical behaviour, the Editorial Board will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Plagiarism prevention

The International Journal Polytechnic does not publish plagiarized papers. The Editorial Board has adopted the stance that plagiarism, where someone assumes another’s ideas, words, or other creative expression as one’s own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism includes the following:

  • Verbatim (word-for-word), or almost verbatim copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author’s work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks) in a way described under Authors’ responsibilities;
  • Copying equations, figures, or tables from someone else’s paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Any manuscript that shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected. In case plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described under the Retraction policy.

To prevent plagiarism, the manuscripts are submitted to a plagiarism detection process using iThenticate/CrossRef. The results obtained are verified by the Editorial Board in accordance with the guidelines and recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI tools may be used exclusively as technical assistance for grammar and spelling corrections, stylistic editing, formatting, under human supervision, and with mandatory disclosure in the Acknowledgements. All intellectual content must be solely the work of the authors, who bear full responsibility for the originality and integrity of the manuscript. An AI tool cannot be listed as an author, co-author, or source of a cited reference. The use of AI for generating parts of the manuscript, altering scientific arguments, manipulating data, or generating references is not permitted. If AI tools were used in the underlying research, this must be described in the Methods section, including the tool name, manufacturer, date of access, and purpose of use. Failure to disclose AI use constitutes a violation of ethical principles and may result in manuscript rejection in accordance with COPE guidelines. Editors and reviewers may use AI tools solely as an aid to their own expert judgment, without delegating decisions, and only within internal, contractually protected systems.

Retraction policy

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder, or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or any major misconduct, require retraction of an article.

Occasionally, a retraction can be used to correct numerous serious errors that cannot be covered by publishing corrections. A retraction may be published by the Editorial Board, the author(s), or both parties consensually.

The retraction takes the form of a separate item listed in the contents and labeled as “Retraction”. The original article is retained unchanged, except for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted”. Retractions are published according to the requirements of COPE.

OPEN ACCESS

Open access policy

International Journal Polytechnic is published under an Open Access licence and 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. All content is available free of charge. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, and search the full text of articles, as well as establish HTML links to them, without having to seek the consent of the author or publisher. The right to use content without consent does not release users from the obligation to give credit to the journal and its content in a manner described under Licensing.

Archiving the digital version

Digital copies of all published volumes are archived on the Journal’s website. In accordance with the law, digital copies of all published volumes are archived in the legal deposit library of the National Library of Serbia.

Article processing charge

International Journal Polytechnic does not charge authors or any third party for publication. Both manuscript submission and processing services, and article publishing services are free of charge. There are no hidden costs whatsoever.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSING

Copyright

Authors retain copyright of the published papers and grant to the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media.

Licensing

The published articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). It is allowed to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided, and it is indicated if changes were made.

Users are required to provide a full bibliographic description of the original publication (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages), as well as its DOI code. In electronic publishing, users are also required to link the content with both the original article published in the International Journal Polytechnic and the license used.

Authors can enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Self-archiving policy

Authors are permitted to deposit the publisher’s version (PDF) of their work in an institutional repository, subject-based repository, or author’s personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), at any time after publication.

Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided, and links must be made to the article’s DOI and the license.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the Editors and the Editorial Staff. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in the articles. Publisher shall have no liability in the event of issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any compensation claims.

INFORMED CONSENT POLICY

Authors of papers published in the International Journal Polytechnic are obliged to demonstrate that they handle the information of individuals participating in their studies with the highest levels of confidence and discretion. Therefore, authors must obtain written informed consent from all persons involved in the study. However, a study may be published without explicit consent if all three of the following conditions are fulfilled: the information is of great significance to public health, obtaining consent would be unusually difficult, and a reasonable individual would be unlikely to object to publication.

STATEMENT OF ETHICS

All manuscripts must include a Statement of Ethics ensuring transparency and compliance with ethical standards in research involving human participants or animals. Authors should include the following statements as applicable.

Study Approval

Provide the name and affiliation of the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board that reviewed and approved the study, along with the corresponding approval number. For example: “This study protocol was reviewed and approved by [committee name and affiliation], approval number [XXX], issued on [approval date].” If ethics approval was not required, this must be clearly stated.

Research Involving Human Participants

In articles reporting research involving human participants, authors must state whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013. Authors must also state whether written informed consent was obtained from all participants or from their parents or legal guardians, as appropriate. The Journal requires authors to confirm in writing that informed consent was obtained; however, the consent forms themselves should be retained by the authors to protect participant confidentiality. If written informed consent was not required or an exemption was granted, this must be clearly stated, including the name of the Ethics Committee that approved the exemption. Where informed consent was obtained, the following wording may be used: “Complete written informed consent was obtained from the patient for the publication of this study and accompanying images.”

Research Involving Animals

In articles reporting experiments on animals, authors must state whether the procedures followed were in accordance with national and international guidelines, including Directive 2010/63/EU in Europe. Procedures should be approved by the appropriate ethics committee, and a statement of compliance with relevant guidelines and/or ethics approval must be submitted with the manuscript. Studies must incorporate accepted standards of best veterinary practice, including procedures related to the humane endpoint and sacrifice of animals.

PRIVACY STATEMENT

The Journal is committed to respecting and safeguarding your privacy. This statement outlines the types of personal information we collect from authors, reviewers, readers, and other visitors to the website. It also explains how we use this information, the measures we take to protect it, and your rights regarding your personal data.

Data We Collect

Contact details: We may collect names, institutional affiliations, email addresses, and postal addresses, primarily from authors and reviewers, to manage submissions, peer review processes, and related correspondence.

Manuscript and publication data: Submitted manuscripts are peer-reviewed reports that may contain personal information, such as author affiliation, acknowledgements, or other identifying details.

Website usage data: When you access our website, certain information may be automatically collected. This data is used to monitor site performance, enhance user experience, and ensure website functionality.

How We Use Personal Information

Manuscript handling: Personal information provided by authors and reviewers is used exclusively to facilitate editorial and publishing processes, including peer review and communications regarding submissions and accepted articles.

Communications and updates: Contact details may be used to provide important information regarding submissions, editorial decisions, policy updates, and other Journal-related announcements.

Website improvement: Aggregate and non-identifiable website usage data are analyzed to optimize navigation, functionality, and content relevance.

Legal compliance: Personal information may be processed to comply with applicable laws, regulations, or lawful requests and proceedings.

Data Protection and Retention

Data Security: We implement appropriate administrative, technical, and organizational measures to safeguard personal information against unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or loss.

Retention period: Personal information is retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this statement, to meet legal and regulatory requirements, or as otherwise required to maintain accurate scholarly records.

Third-party access: Personal data is not shared with third parties except where necessary for the editorial and publishing process (e.g., indexing services) or when required by law.

Your rights: Depending on applicable laws and regulations, you may have the right to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data, as well as to restrict or object to certain processing activities. Requests can be directed to the editorial office.

REVIEWING PROCEDURE

Peer reviewers

International Journal Polytechnic uses a double-blind review system for all papers. The reviewers are selected solely according to whether they have the relevant expertise for evaluating a manuscript. They must not be from the same institution as the author(s) of the manuscript, nor be their co-authors in the recent past. No suggestions of individual reviewers by the author(s) of the manuscript will be accepted.

The purpose of peer review is to assist the Editorial Board in deciding whether to accept or reject a paper. The purpose is also to assist the author in improving papers.

Peer review process

Manuscripts are sent for review only if they pass the initial evaluation regarding their form and thematic scope. Special care is taken that the initial evaluation does not last longer than necessary.

Under normal circumstances, the review process takes up to four weeks, and only exceptionally up to three months. The total period from the submission of a manuscript until its publication takes an average of 90 days.

During the review process, the Editor-in-Chief may require authors to provide additional information (including raw data) if it is necessary for the evaluation of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential and must not be used for any other purposes.

Resolving inconsistences

In the case that the authors have serious and reasonable objections to the reviews, the Editorial Board makes an assessment of whether a review is objective and whether it meets academic standards. If there is a doubt about the objectivity or quality of the review, the Editor-in-Chief will assign additional reviewer(s).

Additional reviewers may also be assigned when reviewers’ decisions (accept or reject) are contrary to each other or otherwise substantially incompatible.

The final decision on the acceptance of the manuscript for publication rests solely with the Editorial Board.

POST-ACCEPTANCE PROCESS

Once a manuscript is accepted, it enters the Journal’s production workflow. During this stage, production staff edit the manuscript for grammar, style, and clarity, prepare figures, and format the text according to the Journal’s style guidelines. The copyedited version (publication proofs) is then sent to the corresponding author for review of typesetting accuracy. Authors are asked to respond to queries (embedded in the proofs) and provide any necessary corrections as an attachment in response to the proof email. Please note that no substantive changes to the manuscript are permitted at this stage. After incorporating the author’s approved corrections, the article will be finalized and made freely available online under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) as a fully formatted article in the Journal’s regular publication schedule.