Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

R-Economy is a double-blind peer-reviewed online journal committed to publishing high quality research in the field of regional economics and urban studies. The Journal provides a forum for theoretical and empirical original contributions addressing a wide spectrum of issues associated with transformations in regional socio-economic systems. Particular attention is paid to the processes of integration and fragmentation of regional socio-economic systems in post-socialist, emerging and BRICS economies, as well as to the growing role of cities as foci of contemporary socio-economic and political activity.

The Journal is a resource for researchers, graduate students and all those interested in the problems of regional economics and urban development.

‘R’ in the Journal’s title refers to its three major foci – Region (regional development), Regulation (regional policy in а comparative perspective) and Reconfiguration (spatial socioeconomic and political transformations).

Priority research areas:

▪ Regional differentiation and polarization analysis
▪ National and international ratings of regional development
▪ Regional development modelling and forecasting
▪ BRICS economies
▪ Economic convergence of regions
▪ Statistical indicators of regional development
▪ Comparative research methods in regional and urban studies
▪ Urban systems and networks
▪ Capital, primary and secondary cities
▪ Metropolitan areas
▪ Shrinking cities
▪ Company towns
▪ Research methods in urban studies
▪ Urban policy analysis
▪ Big data in urban research
▪ Federalism and multilevel governance

 

Section Policies

Articles

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed
 

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted to R-economy are subject to mandatory double-blind peer review. This type of scientific expertise implies that neither the Reviewer nor the Author is aware of each other’s identity.


Peer-review order
1. Submitted manuscripts are initially checked against minimal acceptance criteria to ensure their compliance with the Journal’s remit and the formal requirements specified in the Author Guidelines.
2. The Editor-in-Chief has the right to reject manuscripts prior to the-peer review stage in cases of their low research quality, about which the Author(s) are notified within the period of 2 weeks.
3. The manuscripts meeting the Journal’s minimal acceptance criteria and formal requirements are forwarded for peer review by independent specialists having professional competencies and expertise in the corresponding fields of economics and publications on the subject of the peer-reviewed article over the past 3 years..
4. The Editor-in-Chief or the Executive Secretary selects Reviewers for each manuscript.
5. Peer review is normally completed within the period of 1 month. Upon the request of Reviewers or when additional evaluation is needed, the peer-review period can be extended. The Author(s) are notified about the extension of the peer-review period.
6. Reviewers are notified that manuscripts forwarded for review are the private property of the Author(s) and include confidential information.
7. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of the peer-review process.
8. Reviewers should decline a review request in cases where conflicts of interest are present that can affect the perception and interpretation of the materials under review.
9. Upon completing the assessment of the manuscript, the Reviewer makes one of the following recommendations:
• accept the manuscript for publication in its present form;
• request the Author(s) to revise their manuscript following the Reviewer's comments;
• reject the manuscript outright.
10. In cases where Reviewers have recommended revisions, the Journal requests the Author(s) either to introduce the necessary revisions or present reasoned arguments as to why the revisions should not be introduced. The Author(s) are requested to make the required changes within a period of no longer than 2 months from the reception of the relevant email from the editorial office. Revised articles are sent out for additional review.
11. Authors are requested to notify the Editors if they refuse to revise a manuscript following the Reviewer’s comments, thus withdrawing the manuscript from the publication queue. Revised manuscripts not re-submitted after 2 months of receiving the initial review will be treated as entirely new submissions. In such cases, the Authors will be forwarded a corresponding notification on the removal of their manuscript from registration due to the expiration of the time allotted for revision.
12. In cases of disagreement with the opinion of the Reviewer, the corresponding Author of the article has the right to provide a reasoned response to the Editorial Board of the Journal.
13. In cases where the Author(s) and the Reviewer(s) encounter insoluble contradictions regarding the content of the manuscript, the Editor-in-Chief shall forward the manuscript for additional review. The final decision regarding any conflicts arising during the peer review process will be taken exclusively by the Editor-in-Chief.
14. Positive reviews do not guarantee acceptance for publication, since the final decision on the publication rests exclusively with the Editor-in-Chief.
15. Upon the decision to accept a manuscript for publication, its Author(s) will be notified of the scheduled period of publication. In cases where a decision is taken to reject a manuscript, its Author(s) will be notified by email along with a reasoned explanation.
16. Peer review is carried out on a pro bono basis.
17. Original reviews remain deposited in the in the Editorial Office for three years.


Peer-review form
The review should contain a qualified assessment of the manuscript. Special attention should be paid to the following aspects:
• relevance of the topic, scientific novelty and significance of the material presented in the manuscript;
• originality of the materials, absence of unattributed borrowings and account of Author's previously published works;
• correspondence of the applied methodology, obtained results and formulated recommendations with contemporary scientific achievements;
• quality of the manuscript design: structure, style, terminology; volume of the article as a whole and its individual elements (text, tables, illustrative material, bibliographic references);
• quality of tables and illustrative materials and their relevance to the manuscript subject;
• credibility of the presented information; strength of arguments, hypotheses and conclusions;
• presence or absence of inaccuracies and errors.

 

Publication Frequency

The journal publishes four issues per year.

All manuscripts are to be peer-reviewed.

 

Open Access Policy

Our goal is to create an open-access on-line journal and to ensure the high quality of publications that would enhance the journal’s visibility in the international academic community. In line with the Budapest Open-Access Initiative, the journal seeks to make research freely accessible to everybody, providing Internet users with direct links to full texts of the articles to read, download, copy, distribute, print, and browse through. The texts can be also crawled and indexed, passed as data to software, or used for any other lawful purposes, without any financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

 

Publication Fees

The Journal charges the author neither the article processing charge (APC), nor the article submission charge. Therefore, no fees are charged at any stage of the publication process, including submission, reviewing, editing and publishing

 

Code of Ethics

R-economy is a peer-reviewed academic journal guided exclusively by the goal of benefitting of science. The Editorial Board shall express no political, ideological, confessional, or other extraneous preferences. All parties to the process of academic communication (authors, reviewers, editors, and Editorial Board members) must make every reasonable effort to adhere to the tenets of this document, which has been developed in compliance with international best practices in scholarly publishing and following the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the declaration “Ethical Principles for Scientific Publications” published by the Association of Scientific Editors and Publishers (ASEP, Russia). The Editorial Board conducts its work in accordance with the relevant current legislation of the Russian Federation.

Ethical Code for Authors

Authors submitting manuscripts to R-economy are expected to adhere to the following ethical guidelines:

1. An author’s central obligation is to present an accurate and complete account of the research performed while absolutely avoiding deception, including presentation of the data collected or used as well as an objective discussion of the significance of the research. Data are defined as information collected or used in generating research conclusions. The research report and the data collected should contain sufficient detail and reference to public sources of information to permit a trained professional to reproduce the experimental observations.

2. When requested, the authors should make every reasonable effort to provide additional data to reviewers. Authors are encouraged to submit their data to a public database, where relevant and available.

3. An author should cite those publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work and that will guide the reader quickly to earlier work that is essential for understanding the present investigation. An author is obligated to perform a literature search to find, and then cite, the original publications that describe closely related work.

4. Fragmentation of research reports should be avoided. A researcher who has done extensive work on a system or group of related systems should organize publication so that each report provides a well-rounded account of a particular aspect of the general study. Fragmentation consumes excessive journal space and unduly complicates literature searches. The convenience of readers is served if reports on related studies are published in the same journal, or in a small number of journals.

5. In submitting a manuscript for publication, an author should inform the editor of related manuscripts that the author has under editorial consideration or in press. Copies of those manuscripts should be supplied to the Editor-in-Chief, and the relationship of such manuscripts to the submitted manuscript should be indicated.

6. It is improper for an author to submit manuscripts describing essentially the same research to more than one journal of primary publication, except in the case of resubmission of a manuscript rejected for or withdrawn from publication. It is generally permissible to submit a manuscript for a full paper expanding on a previously published brief preliminary account (a ‘communication’ or ‘letter’) of the same work. However, at the time of submission, the editor should be made aware of such earlier communication, and the preliminary communication should be cited in the manuscript.

7. An author should identify the source of all information quoted or offered, except that which is common knowledge. Information obtained privately, as in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, should not be used or reported in the author’s work without explicit permission from the investigator with whom the information originated. Information obtained in the course of confidential services, such as manuscript reviews or grant applications, should be treated similarly.

8. An experimental or theoretical study may sometimes justify criticism, even severe criticism, of another researcher’s work. When appropriate, such criticism may be offered in published papers. However, in no case is personal criticism considered appropriate.

9. The co-authors of a paper should comprise all those persons who have made significant scientific contributions to the work reported and who share responsibility and accountability for the results. Authors should appropriately recognize the contributions of technical staff and data professionals. Other contributions should be indicated in a footnote or an acknowledgments section. An administrative relationship to the investigation does not of itself qualify a person for co-authorship (but occasionally it may be appropriate to acknowledge major administrative assistance). Deceased persons who meet the criterion for inclusion as co-authors should be so included, with a footnote reporting the date of death. No fictitious name should be listed as an author or co-author. The author who submits a manuscript for publication accepts the responsibility of having included as co-authors all persons appropriate and none inappropriate. The submitting author should have sent each living co-author a draft copy of the manuscript and have obtained each co-author’s assent to co-authorship.

10. Images should be free from misleading manipulation. When images are included in an account of research or data collection performed, an accurate description of how the images were generated and produced should be provided.

Ethical Code for Reviewers

Reviewers’ work is aimed at providing a rigorous scientific evaluation of materials submitted to R-economy. Therefore, reviewers’ behaviour should be free of bias, as demonstrated by adherence to the following recommendations:

1. A reviewer should disclose any known or perceived conflict of interest to the Editor-in-Chief before agreeing to write a review. Examples include, but are not restricted to, past (within the last five years) or current collaboration, personal friendship, employer or employee relationship, family relationship, institutional relationship, past or present graduate advisor or advisee relationship, situations in which the reviewer has had a past or ongoing scientific controversy with any author or co-author, or situations in which the reviewer could stand to gain economically by publication or rejection of the manuscript. The editor will assess whether a conflict is substantial enough to prevent the reviewer from writing a fair, objective review.

2. A reviewer should decline to review a manuscript if she/he feels technically unqualified, if a timely review cannot be done, if the manuscript is from a scientific competitor with whom the reviewer has had an acrimonious professional relationship, or in the case of a conflict of interest as defined above.

3. Reviewers should be encouraged, but not required, to sign reviews. The editor will preserve the anonymity of reviewers who elect to remain anonymous.

4. Reviewers should treat the manuscript as confidential.

5. Reviewers should ask the editor for permission to discuss the paper with others for specific advice, giving names and reasons for such consultation.

6. Reviewers should not pass the manuscript to another to carry out the review without permission from the editor.

7. Reviewers should not use information, data, theories, or interpretative material from the manuscript in their own work until that manuscript is in press or published, unless the author has given permission to do so.

8. Reviewers should clearly support and justify the basis for their review analysis.

9. Reviewers should alert the editor to similar manuscripts published or under consideration for publication elsewhere in the event they are aware of such. However, it is the responsibility of the editor, not the reviewer, to decide on the proper course of action once so informed.

Ethical Code for the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board

The Editor-in-Chief bears full personal responsibility for the content published in the R-economy journal. The Editor-in-Chief is guided by the ethical code presented here, as well as by the relevant current legislation of the Russian Federation with regard to defamation, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. 

The Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board members should adhere to the following ethical principles:

  • base their decisions solely on the validation of the work in question and its scientific rigour;
  • evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to the race, sex/gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnic origin, citizenship, social status, academic rank, or political preferences of the authors;
  • defend the freedom of scientific inquiry;
  • keep any information about submitted manuscripts confidential from anyone except those directly involved in the publication process;
  • never use information or ideas contained in the submitted manuscripts for their personal benefit; 
  • protect the confidentiality of reviewers’ information;
  • ensure the confidentiality of the entire peer-review process;
  • ensure that the submitted manuscripts be processed in a timely and efficient manner;
  • be mindful that the primary goal of the journal is the benefit of science, not profit;
  • withdraw manuscripts containing suspected plagiarism from the publication process;
  • continuously update the pool of independent specialists acting as peer reviewers;
  • consistently work on raising the ethical standards of editorial work and the publication process;
  • ensure the quality of linguistic translation by means of employing professional specialists in cases when the original text is translated into another language (English or Russian) before publication;
  • convene meetings of the Editorial Board, either in person or remotely, at least three times per year, to make strategic decisions or discuss current issues;
  • promote discussions on the journal’s pages and be prepared to respond to critical comments to the articles published therein;
  • consider manuscripts containing negative results on general grounds.

Plagiarism Detection

Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable. All submissions are checked for inappropriate borrowing using the Antiplagiat software and Google Scholar.

Plagiarism is the presentation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. Authors should not engage in plagiarism—that is, verbatim or near-verbatim copying, or very close paraphrasing, of text or results from another’s work. Authors should not engage in self-plagiarism (also known as duplicate publication)—that is, unacceptably close replication of the author’s own previously published text or results without acknowledgement of the source. If one or two identical sentences previously published by an author appear in a subsequent work by the same author, this is unlikely to be regarded as duplicate publication. Material quoted verbatim from the author’s previously published work must be placed in quotation marks. In contrast, it is unacceptable for an author to include significant verbatim or near-verbatim portions of his/her own work, or to depict his/her previously published results or methodology as new, and failing to acknowledge the source.

Conflict of Interest

Public trust in science, as well as the overall credibility of scientific findings, in large measure depends on how well potential, perceived, or actual conflicts of interest are mitigated and managed. Conflicts of interest can arise during the course of research, peer review, and the publication process. Conflicts of interest arise when there is a risk that independent professional judgement can be influenced by personal or financial interests.

The Editorial Board of R-economy requires that authors disclose any relationships with organizations that may have affected the interpretation of the obtained results or the recommendations provided. Any such information should be disclosed in the paper subsection ‘Conflict of Interest’.

Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive or other relationships with any institutions involved in the research.

The Editor-in-Chief should pass the submitted manuscript for consideration by another Editorial Board member (Executive Editor, Editorial Board member) if he/she discovers conflicts of interest resulting from competitive or other relationships with any of the authors or institutions involved in the presented research.

Articles submitted by the members of the Editorial Board or the Editorial Council are treated, without bias, according to the same ethical principles established in this document.

Changes to Authorship

Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and to provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission. Any addition, omission, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the journal editor. To request such a change, the corresponding author must provide to the editor the following: (a) the reason for the change in author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal, or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Only in exceptional circumstances will the editor consider the addition, removal, or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the editor considers any such request, publication of the manuscript will be suspended. If the manuscript has already been published online, any request approved by the editor will result in a corrigendum.

Retraction

A retraction procedure in compliance with the COPE protocol is applied whenever the Editorial Board of R-economy:

  • receives evidence of the fraudulence of the published information as a result of either the authors’ conscious actions or bona fide errors (e.g. non-intentional errors in calculations);
  • receives evidence of multiple publications or multiple submissions;
  • reveals the fact of a deliberate or non-intentional concealment of a conflict of interest, which could have affected the interpretation of the data or recommendations on the use of the obtained results.

Retraction is aimed at correcting errors in publications and informing the readership about those papers including erroneous data. 

Retraction does not imply deletion of the publication from the website of the journal or corresponding bibliographic databases. A retraction note is published alongside the original publication. The original article is retained unchanged, except for a watermark on the .pdf indicating ‘retraction’. This is considered important, since the paper may have already been cited by third parties. Information about retracted papers is presented on the journal’s website.

 

Indexing & Archiving

All published articles are available for free in the website and are indexed in Scopus (http://scopus.com), RePEc (https://ideas.repec.org) and Russian Science Citation Index (https://elibrary.ru). R-Economy is also included into the list of journals approved by the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK list)

 

About the Publishing House

R-Economy is published by Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N.Yeltsin”.

Contacts: Ural Federal University Publishing House, 620000, Russia, Ekaterinburg, 4 Turgeneva st., room 106. Tel. +7(343)371-54-48, e-mail: a.v.podchinenov@urfu.ru (Alexey Vasil'evich Podchinenov, deputy director).