Aim and Scope

The mission of our journal is to assist the discussion of issues of contemporary theoretical folklore studies, in which Russian academia has traditionally been quite successful.

The journal is aimed at studying folklore as a base form of sociocultural communication, which is closely related to, on one hand, understanding the processes of ethnic identification, and, on the other hand, to the problems of cognitive sciences which dwell upon the mechanisms of acquiring, processing, preserving and transferring knowledge.

 Papers published in the journal focus on studying oral traditions and ritual practices, archaic mythology and its contemporary modifications, interdisciplinary studies in these matters.

The journal accepts original submissions by authors from Russia and worldwide, short essays “from the desk”, papers in history of folklore studies (especially concerning the lesser known or unknown episodes of such), essays on world folklore, field and archive materials, reports of academical events, reviews and reports, bibliographies, developments in software and methodology for graduate programs in folklore studies.

Section Policies

Publication Frequency

4 выпуска в год

Open Access Policy

"Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics" is an open access journal. All articles are made freely available to readers immediatly upon publication.

Our open access policy is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition - it means that articles have free availability on the public internet, 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.

For more information please read BOAI statement.

Archiving

• Russian State Library (RSL)
• National Electronic-Information Consortium (NEICON)

Peer-Review

Papers submitted for publication in “Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics” undergo mandatory peer review.

Stages of peer review are as following:

1. Review of the paper by the executive secretary regarding its compliance to the basic requirements for publication as established by the editorial board. Takes 3 days max since submission is received. Besides, all papers are checked via “Antiplagiarism” system regarding any borrowings.

Depending on the quality of submitted material and its compliance to the thematic of the journal, the submission can be either accepted and forwarded for review (except cases listed below), or sent back to the author for technical corrections, or rejected whatsoever (if agreed upon by the editor-in-chief). Papers that are not formatted according to the technical requirements, and the authors of which refuse to format their manuscripts accordingly, are rejected.

The following types of materials are not subject to mandatory external review:

• Short notes (introductory, editorial);
• Field and archive materials;
• Reviews on scholarly literature and publications of studied texts;
• Reports on scholarly events, field trips, exhibitions and other events in academia;
• Interviews with scholars, polls, questionnaires of the journal “round tables” and forums;
• «Personalia», «In memoriam», jubilees, necrologies.

Intra-editorial review is sufficient for accepting such submission, but the editorial staff might employ additional review by a member of the editorial board if necessary.

2.  External review is performed by a researcher in a relevant field who has been awarded a Cand. Sci. grade minimum (except cases where reputation of a unique scholar who has not been awarded a PhD allows trusting them with a review nevertheless). The reviewer is chosen by the editorial staff. The reviewer cannot be a co-author of the reviewed submission, an academical or administrative supervisor of any of its authors, a member of editorial staff or a guest editor of the relevant themed issue. A reviewer can review no more than two submissions per issue. Deadlines for review are set by the editorial staff by agreement with the reviewer (from 2 to 4 weeks). Reviews are conducted voluntarily and pro bono.

Review is double anonymous – neither author nor reviewer have any information about each other.

Reviewers are notified that submissions forwarded to them are intellectual property of their authors and are confidential. Reviewers are strongly encouraged to refrain from copying the submissions undergoing review for their own needs.

3. Submissions subject to reviews are evaluated according to the following criteria:

• Accordance to the remit of the journal
• Clarity of target setting
• Extensiveness of coverage
• Argumentativeness and logic of the narration
• Novelty, relevance and originality of the research
• Credibility and thoroughness of the data
• Taking the history of the problem and relevant academic context into account
• Theoretical and methodological fitting
• Accuracy of the analysis, definitions and wording used
• Inappropriate borrowings / other violation of academic ethics
• Credibility and thoroughness of the conclusions, their compliance with the analysis
• Research impact of the results

Upon evaluating, the reviewer may recommend to

• Accept the submission without further changes
• Accept the submission with minor improvements (no repeat review)
• Accept the submission with major improvements (with repeat review)
• Reject the submission

The review is formatted according to the template recommended by the editorial board. The content-related part of the review is sent to the author of the submission.

4. If the review requires editing the submission, the latter – according to the notes – is sent to the author for improvement. The deadline is set in agreement with the author (date of submission of the paper to the journal is still considered to be overall submission date). Edited or rewritten submissions may be subject to repeat review.

In case of disagreement with the reviewer, the author may forward an argumentative response to the editorial staff, after which the submission may undergo repeat review, or to the editorial board, to hear the parties’ arguments and specify the journal’s stand on the situation. The author’s refusal to comply to the reviewer’s notes – without an argumentative basis for such refusal – constitutes grounds for rejection of the submission.

In case of an unambiguously negative review (with which the editorial staff agrees) the author receives a copy of the review and a letter of rejection of their submission. If a rejected submission is submitted again after a radical reworking of it by the author, it is considered and reviewed per standard procedure.

The final decision upon publication of a submission is a collective decision of the editorial staff and the guest editor on the basis of the review and in consideration of the opinion of the editorial board; in case of sufficient disagreement on evaluation of the submission between said parties, additional expertise may be in order.

Indexation

Articles in "Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics" are indexed by several systems:

• Russian Index for Science Citation (RISC) – a database, accumulating information on papers by Russian scientists, published in native and foreign titles. The RSCI project is under development since 2005 by “Electronic Scientific Library” foundation (elibrary.ru).
• Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. The Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest scholarly publishers, plus scholarly books and other non-peer reviewed journals.

Publishing Ethics

The journal “Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics” is publishing research in contemporary theoretical folklore studies and adheres to the ethical norms accepted by the Association of Science Editors and Publishers (ASEP) in the declaration “Ethical principles of academic publications”. Compliance to these is mandatory for all participants of the editorial and publishing process: the editorial staff (science editors, executive secretary, editor-in-chief and deputy editor-in-chief), reviewers, the editorial board and authors.

The editorial staff

1. The editor evaluates submissions regardless of the author(s) gender, age, race, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, nationality, political views or the editor’s personal relationship with the author.

2. The editor monitors over absence of personal criticism, pejorative comments and blamings of other researchers in submissions.

3. All major improvements to an edited submission are mandatorily agreed upon by the author (except technical formatting according to journal requirements and bibliography, also proofreading). The author is provided a possibility to acquaint themselves with the preprint of the paper to approve their consent for publishing it in this exact version.

4. If after the submission is published, substantial mistakes are discovered, the editorial staff, by agreement with the author, may decide upon publication of the amendments (in hard copy - in the next issue of the journal, in web version the amendments are inserted into the text).

5. The editorial staff allows the author to specify the financing party to their research (grant, state commission, university or academic program etc.) and to express their gratitude to the colleagues that have contributed to the paper significantly.

6. To maintain confidentiality, the journal recommends the authors to avoid disclosure of informants’ personal data, except when there is a written statement from the informant that they wish for their personal data to be published.

7. The editor does not disclose personal data about authors and reviewers, including e-mails, to non-members of the editorial staff. Such data is only used in preparing the submission for publishing.

8. The reviewer must evaluate the submission impartially and in a closely reasoned fashion, keep information about the submission confidential, refrain from using the reviewed text to personal ends, from copying it, distributing it and putting it online, etc.

9. In case of a conflict of interests obstructing impartial evaluation of the

submission, the reviewer must inform the editorial staff member in charge as soon as possible and decline peer review.

10. The editorial board participate in formation of publishing policy of the journal, encourage inviting researchers to cooperation and submitting work, consult the editorial staff pro bono on matters relevant to the remits of “Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics”.

The editorial staff expects the authors to adhere to the following in their relationship with the journal:

1. The author submits a fully original work, previously unpublished and not submitted elsewhere; publication of translated works is agreed upon individually upon agreement with the copyright holder.

2. The author guarantees that the results of the research are as credible as possible, research methodology is replicable, and the manuscript contains appropriate quotations of others’ works and exact links to data only. If during the editing mistakes or discrepancies are discovered, the author notifies the editorial staff and either corrects the work or withdraws it (in case the mistakes call for the full rewriting of the text).

3. The journal must be guaranteed that everyone who participated in writing the paper are listed as co-authors. By submitting the work, the author(s) assume that the author(s) are copyright holders to the material; each one of the co-authors are responsible for the contents of the paper. Transferring third parties’ copyright (e.g., to illustrative material) is documented by a written statement of agreement.

4. Publications are pro bono. Rights to the published work belong both to the co-author(s) and the journal. The author has the right to non-commercial use of the published work (e.g. for education or research) but guarantees that they will not reproduce it in another media without a link to the publication in “Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics”, neither fully nor partially. The publisher of the journal is entitled to use any means of communication (traditional and digital) for distribution of the published materials.

5. Any alterations of the text after the review and acceptance of the submission for publication can be made by the author only in agreement with the editorial staff. The author must not provide open access to any of the materials accepted for publication in the journal but not published yet. Withdrawal of a work accepted for publication and forwarded for editing is considered as disrespect of the journal and any further relationship with the author is thus impossible.

Publishing ethics dispute settlement procedure

1. Anyone can inform the editorial staff of a violation of publishing ethics either by an author or a reviewer at any time. As a result, the editor-in-chief initiates an investigation to gather sufficient further data, but such a notice of unethical conduct must contain enough information and proofs, otherwise it is rendered unworthy of further attention.

2. In case of a dispute between any participants of the publication process (author,

reviewer, executive editor, editor) the party that has witnessed the dispute must inform

of the fact the editor-in-chief, the deputy editor-in-chief and the executive editor via

email. Said parties conduct a joint assessment of the situation and decide upon the settlement of the dispute in 5 business days max since the complaint was filed.

3. In case any circumstances impeditive to impartial assessment of a submission are discovered, the editor-in-chief provides an opportunity to either author or reviewer to answer to any suspicions or charges and transfers the evaluation of the submission to another expert.

4. As a result of such investigation, the editorial staff can either:

• Notify the author or the reviewer of their breach of publishing ethics.
• Send a warning note to the author or reviewer notifying them of discovered breach of publishing ethics.
• Publish information about discovered breach of publishing ethics on the journal website.
• Retract the paper with publishing information about said fact both on the journal website and in relevant databases.
• Ban the author or the reviewer from cooperation with  the journal for three years.

The disputing parties are notified of the decision as soon as possible.

Founder

• Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH)

Author fees

Publication in "Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics" is free of charge for all the authors.

The journal doesn't have any Article processing charges.

The journal doesn't have any Article submission charges.

Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.

Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

Plagiarism detection

"Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics" use native russian-language plagiarism detection software Antiplagiat to screen the submissions. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.

Preprint and postprint Policy

Prior to acceptance and publication in "Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics", authors may make their submissions available as preprints on personal or public websites.

As part of submission process, authors are required to confirm that the submission has not been previously published, nor has been submitted. After a manuscript has been published in "Folklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics" we suggest that the link to the article on journal's website is used when the article is shared on personal or public websites.

Glossary (by SHERPA)

ISSN 2658-5294 (Print)