Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

The mission of the scientific and practical publication The Russian Journal of Psychiatry is in unifying the research efforts and in establishing contacts between highly qualified scientists and practitioners in developing the field of “psychiatry” in accordance with the topical social problems.

The editorial office of the Journal in guided in its activities by the legislation of the Russian Federation, the Charter of the Journal, and other documents, which had been approved by the Founder, as well as the recommendations, issued by the Editorial Board and the Editorial Council of the Journal.

The printed version of the Journal is published since 1997. It is intended for researchers, practitioners, educators, and graduate students. Manuscripts are accepted for publication after undergoing the peer review and issuing of the official opinion by the experts in the corresponding field.

This publication has been included in the list of publications, in which, in accordance with the recommendations, issued by the Higher Attestation Commission, one should publish the works, pertaining to the Doctoral and Candidates’ Dissertations (PhDs and more advanced independent scientific works). We welcome the works, which elucidate various aspects of psychiatry, addiction medicine, and clinical psychology in accordance with the following specialty groups:

14.01.00 Clinical medicine

14.02.00 Prophylactic medicine

14.03.00 Medical-biological sciences

The E-version of the printed Journal has been created for purposes of providing prompt access to the publication, creating the conditions, necessary for the open scientific discussions and independent expert evaluations, which contribute to improving the quality of scientific research and the efficiency in examining the scientific works.

The Journal elucidates the most significant scientific and practical issues of contemporary psychiatry: diagnosis and the modern approaches to the treatment of mental patients, the issues of the psychiatry of emergencies, social and forensic psychiatry, psychiatry of children and adolescents. The readers of the Journal are regularly informed of the official documents, which deal with the issues, pertaining to the organization of psychiatric care; readers are also informed of the latest congresses, conferences, and workshops.

Section Policies

PUBLIC HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE

Open Submissions

Open Submissions

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

The Journal publishes only those manuscripts, which had been recommended by the peer reviewers. For these purposes the editorial office runs the “blind” (anonymous) peer review of the submitted manuscripts.

The choice of peer reviewers is carried out either by the Editor-in-Chief or by the Deputy Editor-in-Chief. Peer review may be carried out both by the members of the Journal’s Editorial Council, and by the highly qualified scientists and the leading specialists at the therapeutic and prophylactic institutions in the field, who possess profound professional knowledge and working experience in a particular scientific area; these are Doctors of Science and Professors, and – on rare occasions – Candidates of Science.

Peer reviewers are advised that the manuscripts, which are being sent to them, are the private property of the authors, and are to be treated as data, which is not to be made public or further used in any way for personal ends. Peer review process is confidential. Should false or falsified data be discovered in a submitted article, peer reviewers are obligated to make a statement, addressed solely to the editorial office. Instances of this nature are further reexamined and correspondingly evaluated by the editorial office. The author would then receive a substantiated rejection.
Articles should be reviewed within one week of being submitted for review. However, this term may be extended for another week, of which the author would then be informed.

Should a peer review contain recommendations for a particular article to be corrected, this article would be forwarded to the author for purposes of being further worked on. In this case it is the date of receiving the corrected article, that will be considered as the date of submission.

Should the article undergo considerable revision by the author in accordance with a peer reviewer’s recommendations, it would then be forwarded to the same reviewer for reconsideration.

Should an author be either unable or unwilling to accommodate editorial recommendations, the editorial office reserves the right to reject articles at any stage of the process.

Should negative peer reviews be returned by two separate reviewers in respect of a manuscript, or should a negative review be returned in respect of the previously corrected variant, the manuscript would be rejected without any further consideration by other members of the Editorial Board or the Editorial Council. The decision as to the feasibility of publication following peer review is taken by the Editor-in-Chief.

A substantiated rejection would be forwarded to the author of a rejected article by the officer, responsible for the issue. Peer reviewer’s last name may be shared with the author only if the reviewer should have no objections to this.

The originals of reviews are electronically archived on the Journal’s web site for 5 years post publication date.

Author Self-Archiving

Этот журнал разрешает и даже рекомендует авторам размещать статьи, отправленные в этот журнал для публикации, на своих персональных веб-сайтах или в других репозиториях как до, так и после публикации статьи, указывая в библиографическом описании, по возможности, ссылку на публикацию в этом журнале.

Delayed Open Access

The contents of this journal will be available in an open access format 12 month(s) after an issue is published.

The main stipulations of editorial ethics

The main stipulations of editorial ethics have been developed on the basis of the recommendations, issued by international scientific societies and publishing houses (COPE, ICMJE, CONSORT, WHO, BMJ, Wiley, Springer).

The authors should be familiar with, and should abide by the stipulations of editorial ethics as far as the issues of authorship, conflict of interests, and distribution are concerned; the authors should steer clear of simultaneous submission of one and the same material to several publishers, plagiarism, data manipulation, etc.

Responsibility for the authenticity of data, presented in the articles, as well as for the accuracy of titles, names, and quotations, rests with the authors.
Should illicit borrowing be detected, the responsibility would be carried by the authors of the submitted materials.
Should illicit borrowing be detected in an article after its publication, the editorial office will take all steps in order to deal with such negative occurrence, including the removal of such a publication from indexation and scientometrics systems, and posting a notice to that effect.

Reviewers and editors are obligated to carry out an impartial expert review of the manuscripts, respecting confidentiality and declaring any conflict of interest well in advance.

The editorial office should carefully study all dubious situations and infractions; it should correct or withdraw materials whenever necessary.

General obligations and responsibility of the editorial office

The editorial office is responsible for the quality of the content of the published Journal.
In the course of the editorial and publishing process, it provides technical and informational support to Journal users.
The editorial office guarantees safeguarding the intactness of materials received.
It guarantees the confidentiality of the materials, submitted to the Journal, throughout the entire editorial and publishing process.
We guarantee that all participants in the editorial and publishing process have received the requisite training, have been supplied with detailed instructions and recommendations, and have sufficient skills and experience of working on a scientific Journal.
The editorial office takes into account the corrections and suggestions, received from readers, authors and reviewers, pertaining to the ways of improving the publication activities.
The editorial office promptly responds to all complaints, pertaining to the Journal activities, and it guarantees that all problematic issues would be satisfactorily resolved.

Collaborating with readers

The editorial office ensures the availability of adequate information to readers, and the distribution of the newly published content.
We guarantee that all published scientific materials will have been reviewed by qualified experts.

Collaborating with authors

The editorial office provides authors with detailed instructions, pertaining to the editorial and publishing process, and with information on the deadlines for submitting materials, as well as issue publication dates.
Authors are provided with a detailed description of the review process; should any alterations be introduced to the latter, the editors would, whenever requested, provide the author with the rationale for the above.
The editorial office determines the criteria for evaluating the materials, it also makes a choice of reviewers to work on each particular manuscript.
We provide authors with unabridged commentaries, submitted by the reviewers.
The editorial office reserves the right to carry out the scientific and the literary editing of the submitted materials, keeping as true as possible to the author’s style. The editorial office may ask authors to submit their source data. Authors should be ready to allow access to the latter, provided such access would not infringe on the confidentiality of the participants in the experiment, or the rights of persons or companies, enjoying the ownership of such data.
It is the authors’ obligation to submit exclusively original works to the editorial office. Whenever works by other authors are mentioned, they should be accurately quoted and referenced.
In submitting the results of original research, authors should provide authentic results of their work and an objective discussion of the significance of their research. Manuscripts should contain all the key data, the precise description of research details, and references to methods, so that their results could be reproducible by others. Falsifying data or knowingly including incorrect statements into a manuscript is seen as unethical and unacceptable.
The editor’s decision to accept/reject a manuscript is based on its topicality, novelty, and the extent to which it fits the scientific field and the requirements of the Journal.
Should a manuscript contain an abundance of dubious points (e.g. when an article is not revised by the author in accordance with the suggestions, made by reviewers and editors), the editorial office may stay the work on preparing such a manuscript for publication.
Authors may request their manuscripts to be withdrawn from review and put into the systemic archive of the Journal (maintaining the possibility of subsequently reinstating it in the line of review). Requests to that effect should be forwarded by authors to the editor.

Collaborating with reviewers

The editorial office provides reviewers with detailed instructions, pertaining to their work for the Journal.
The editorial office would ask reviewers to notify of the presence of a possible conflict of interests, prior to giving assent to review the submitted materials.
The editorial office would ask reviewers to inform of all cases of plagiarism.
The editorial office would contact reviewers to express our gratitude for their contribution to the work on the Journal.
The editorial office guarantees, that the qualification of all reviewers corresponds to the level of the professional publication; the team of reviewers would be subject to adjustment, when necessary.
The editorial office would terminate collaboration with those reviewers, who either submit reviews of poor quality, or systematically delay review submission.
The editorial office relies on a number of sources (besides personal contacts) in identifying potential reviewers (such as specialized databases in the field).
The editorial office guarantees the honesty, objectivity, impartiality, and timeliness of the review process.
The editorial office adapts the review process to the reviewers’ needs and provides each one of them with the opportunity to carry out the reviewing in the most convenient way (either through the Journal system, or via email).
Confidentiality. Reviewers are not authorized to disclose data, contained in manuscripts, prior to their publication.

Collaborating with editors

The editorial office has the obligation to:

provide editors with detailed instructions, pertaining to their work with the system of the Journal, as well as to the peculiarities of the editorial and publication process;
regularly inform members of the editorial staff of innovations and improvements;
provide editors with clear instructions, pertaining to their functions, authority and responsibility (supporting and promoting the Journal);
periodically hold consultations with editorial members, informing them of modifications in the Journal’s policy, technical innovations, and share proposals for further functioning of the Journal.

Confidentiality. Editors are not authorized to disclose data, contained in manuscripts, prior to their publication.

Author status

The author of the manuscript is the researcher, who has made a contribution to the article at all the following stages:

formulating the idea for carrying out the study, the problem, and the objectives of the study;
developing the concept and the design of the manuscript, collecting data, analyzing and interpreting them;
composing the article, or providing its critical scientific review and correction;
approving the final version for publication.

Each author carries responsibility for the content of the article. For work, carried out by a team of scientists, the list of authors should contain the persons, who meet the above-said criteria, or one should specify the title of the team.

Neither funding research, nor carrying out the overall control of the team’s work amount to authorship.

Swapping authors. Should the need arise, for whatever reason, to introduce changes to the list of authors after the submission of the manuscript and prior to its publication, the submitting author would be encouraged to contact the editorial office and indicate the reasons for the requested alterations.

Conflict of interests

Conflict of interests is a group of possible factors, which either make a negative impact on objectivity, or may be perceived as meddling with the process of reviewing, taking editorial decisions, publishing and presenting a manuscript.

Conflict of interests may arise in respect of specific individuals or organizations, and is subdivided into (but not limited to) the following categories:

Personal conflict of interests

Personal relationships (e.g. friends, family members, current or former scientific adviser, dissertation reviewer) with individuals, who take part in either submitting or reviewing manuscripts (authors, reviewers, editors, or members of the editorial board);
Personal beliefs (political, religious, ideological, etc.), relevant to the topic of the manuscript, may interfere with the objectivity of the publication process (at the stage of submission, review, taking editorial decisions, or publishing).

Professional conflict of interests

When reviewer or editor is a colleague of author’s, and either participated in, or observed the carrying out of the particular study.
Membership in organizations, which lobby the author’s interests.

Financial conflict of interests

Research grants, awarded by various funding organizations: governmental, non-governmental, research, or charitable institutions.

Patent applications (current or planned), including those, made by the institutions, with which an author may be affiliated, and which may be the source of profit for the author.

Remuneration, gifts and awards of any kind, related to the submitted material. It should obligatorily be indicated if research has been carried out with financial or other support from any endowments or institutions.

All individuals, involved with the manuscript, including authors, editors, reviewers and those readers, who offer comments or evaluation of the material, must declare any conflict of interests.

The editorial office retains the right not to publish a manuscript, if the conflict of interests, declared by the author, poses a threat to objectivity and reliability of the evaluation of research.

Should the editorial office identify a conflict of interests, which had not been declared at the time of manuscript submission, such manuscript may be rejected. Should an undeclared conflict of interests be uncovered after the publication, such an article, as necessary, may be either modified, or removed from the indexing systems, and reasons for this indicated.

Access and use of materials and data

The authors consent that all materials, presented in the publication, would be in open access and may be used by other researchers for scientific non-commercial purposes, subject to Creative Commons 3.0 Unported license, with the authorship obligatorily indicated.

Auxiliary data (data sets, software applications, photo-, audio-, video materials), which elucidate and complement the content of research, may additionally be placed into institutional repositories, or other Internet-resources, which should be referenced in the article.

Should any doubts arise as to the reliability of data, submitted in a published article, and should there be no open access to these data, thus rendering them unverifiable, the readers may contact the editorial office with a view of getting in touch with the author, verifying and making corrections.

At the editorial office’s request, the authors should offer open access to all data and materials, presented in their articles, provided this would not infringe of the rules of confidentiality, applying to anonymous interviews, carried out as part of the study.

Editing and adding to the text

Whenever needed, the editorial office would introduce necessary alterations and clarifications to the content, publish rebuttals and apologies.
The editorial office may introduce small alterations (correcting small mistakes) and clarifications to the content of the article, which would improve the content without significantly altering the structure of the article as a whole.
The editorial office promptly considers and responds to substantiated criticism of materials, published in the Journal, informing the authors of the feedback received, and asking for comments in response.

Commenting on the published articles

Comments may contain elucidations and additions to the content and to the obtained results, presented in a particular article.
Arguments should either reference published resources, or contain a comprehensive scientific substantiation.
Comments of any other nature (disparaging and indecent statements, advertising and spam) are not accepted.

Manuscripts, submitted to multiple publications

At the time of submission authors are asked to confirm that neither the manuscript being submitted, nor any modified version thereof, has at that point in time been sent for review and publication in any other Journal. Should it be the case that the work has already been either submitted to or published by another Journal, such manuscripts would not be considered by the editorial office for publication.

Intellectual property

The editorial office is responsive to information, pertaining to the issues of intellectual property, striving to prevent potential infractions of the current Russian legislation, which applies to intellectual property and copyright.