About the Journal

Focus and Scope

RIO is born with an academic and professional orientation that seeks to be an instrument to all those people interested in the analysis of organizations. RIO aims to bring together specialists in organizational analysis from different countries and meet the organizational specificities from various social and economic contexts.

The journal aims to be a communication tool for academic and professional community, particularly in research and evaluation organizations, understood in its widest sense.

Peer Review Process

Editorial process: Manuscripts should be original, not-published and not simultaneously proposed for publishing in other journals.

In a first stage, the Assitant Editors will revise the general quality and thematic adequacy of the manuscript; manuscripts whose quality is notoriously low or which do not make any contribution to the journal’s scientific fields may be directly rejected without external refereeing.

Manuscripts which pass the first review will be evaluated by external reviewers through peer review system, respecting confidentiality and anonymity, and according to strict criteria of scientific quality. In case of disagreement between reviewers, editors will make a third evaluation. In any case, based on reviewers’ evaluation, editors will make the final decision.

Open Access Policy

International Journal of Organizations 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. Open access to full contents in PDF are available electronically without any delay.

International Journal of Organizations is published under the licence system Creative Commons, according to the modality “Attribution-ShareAlike (by-sa): derivative work is allowed under the condition of redistributing under the same license as the original”.

Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice

The International Journal of Organisations is committed to maintaining ethical standards and takes as its reference the principles published by COPE (Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors). It is essential for all parties involved in the process (editors, referees and authors) to understand and heed this code’s principles.

Directors/Editors

Decision to publish articles: journal editors, after consulting with the editorial board, are responsible for deciding whether or not to publish submitted articles, following receipt of the verdicts of two external referees and, should there be significant discrepancies between these, that of a third referee. They agree to observe the same criteria for acceptance or rejection of articles in accordance with the originality, relevance and clarity of the same. Editors must offer mechanisms for appeal against editorial decisions to the editorial board. Likewise, they must offer complete and up-to-date instructions regarding authors’ responsibilities and the characteristics of the articles submitted to the journal.
Non-discrimination: Editors shall examine submitted articles without consideration of the race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin, country of origin, nationality or political orientation of the authors.
Confidentiality: editors and other staff associated with the journal agree not to disclose information about the articles received to persons other than the actual author or the referees. Likewise, they guarantee that the procedure shall be conducted in such a way that the anonymity of the referees and authors is guaranteed under all circumstances.
Conflict of interests and disclosure: editors agree not to use the results of submitted articles in their own research work unless they receive the author’s explicit consent.
Errata: editors shall publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies should they be necessary.
Quality: the opinions of the authors, referees and editorial board shall be requested in order to improve the editorial procedure.

Authors

Authorship of the text: a submitted article must be signed by its author and, if relevant, by any other person that has made a significant contribution to the planning, organisation, development or processing of the research on which the article is based. In cases of co-authorship, the author submitting the text must explicitly declare that the names of all of the authors appear in the article, and that they have issued their approval and consent with regard to the final version of the article that is to be published in the UAB journal.
Responsibility: the authors shall be held liable for the content of their manuscripts.
Plagiarism and originality: the authors declare that every part of the text submitted to the journal is original and that all of the sources used have been correctly cited.
Access to and conservation of data: authors of articles must clarify, by request of the editors, the sources or data on which their research is based; this data must be conserved for a reasonable period of time after publication and may be disclosed if necessary.
Multiple, repetitive or conflicting publications: the author must not publish articles that present the same research in more than one journal at the same time.
Conflict of interests and disclosure: the authors shall explicitly declare that there is no conflict of interests that may have conditioned the results of their research or the proposed interpretations. They shall also indicate the sources of funding for the research, if applicable, as well as the project that their article forms part of.
Errors in published articles: should an author notice any relevant errors or inaccuracies in a published article, these must be reported to the editors of the journal and all information required to make the necessary corrections must be provided.

Referees

Expert reviews: the double blind review system shall be employed, a procedure that helps the editors and the editorial board to make decisions about submitted articles while also enabling the authors to make improvements to their work.
Respect for deadlines: after agreeing to review an article, referees must respect the agreed time periods; if they are unable to meet a deadline they should give the editors sufficient prior warning of this.
Confidentiality: articles submitted for review are considered confidential documents, so the referees cannot discuss them with third parties unless they have permission to do so from the editors.
Objectivity: reviews must be objective; personal views about the author are not to be taken into consideration and referees’ opinions of the work must be supported by appropriate and justified arguments.
Bibliographical indications: the referees agree to offer precise bibliographical details on important texts on the subject matter that the author may have omitted; likewise, the referees shall report to the editors on similarities or overlaps between the text received and other works, if there are any.
Conflict of interests and disclosure: Any reserved information that has been obtained as a result of the review procedure shall be considered confidential and may not be used for personal purposes; if the review of an article supposes a conflict with the referee’s own interests due to collaborations or competition with the author or with the institution that he/she represents, the referee must reject the review proposal.

The International Journal of Organizations, published by the Publications Service of the Rovira i Virgili University, uses the anti-plagiarism Urkund platform for all its processes (for more information click on this link). In addition to this, our reviewers use online platforms such as Plagscan Anti-Plagiarism

The Journal reserves the decision to reject articles with an inadequate similarity percentage. Likewise, the author(s) guarantee the authorship and originality of the article, and assume full and exclusive responsibility for damages that may occur as a result of third-party claims regarding the content, authorship or ownership of the content thereof.

Creative Commons License

All the materials published in RIO Journal are under a Creative Commons license.

Publish without fees

Authors are not charged with fees in International Journal of Organizations