High scientific integrity and high academic quality are the central focus at TU Wien Academic Press. All manuscripts, from submission through publication, therefore go through a comprehensive process of quality assurance, including peer review.
Good scientific practice and quality assurance
- In order to ensure good scientific practice, the TU Wien Code of Conduct and the Austrian Agency for Research Integrity Guidelines for Good Scientific Practice are applied.
- The guidelines and publications of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), wherever appropriate for book publishing, inform the approaches and standards of our publishing house: For example, the questionnaire and the first editorial meeting aim at clarifying and avoiding aspects which could later entail “retractions” according to the COPE Retraction Guidelines.
- When attributing authorship, in consultations reference is made to the criteria of the ICMJE.
- In addition, the quality standards for open access monographs and open access anthologies of AG Universitätsverlage are taken into account in regard to the technical, publishing and substantive aspects.
All publishing enquiries are only subjected to assessment if accompanied by a completely filled out standardised questionnaire and at least one book précis. For the assessment, additional information (established depending on the type of publication) is obtained. For special types of publications like conference proceedings and doctoral theses, additional rules apply to quality assurance. In addition, all manuscripts go through formal checks.
In case of a positive decision, a personal publisher’s interview is subsequently held with the authors or editors and aspects of quality assurance are clarified, including a peer review as well as good scientific practice, scheduling, legal questions and licensing, financial questions, etc.
Peer review
All books undergo a peer review procedure at TU Wien Academic Press. The publisher’s standard is the single-blind procedure, though variations can be agreed.
Authors and editors have the option of proposing individuals as referees. The choice of reviewers is made by the publisher after additional searching on its own according to substantive professional criteria. Generally, at least two people are engaged to act as external referees.
- An external peer review procedure can only be conducted by referees who are free of any “conflicts of interest.”
- Editors or series editors are not appointed as reviewers.
- In addition to approval by the publisher, the consent of the series editors must be obtained for the planned publication of a volume in an existing series
With certain types of publications (conference proceedings, doctoral theses, anthologies), in specific instances an adapted review procedure may be used. For this, the publisher’s rules on quality assurance for conference proceedings or doctoral thesis are applied.
The referees appointed by the publisher provide their opinion by means of a standardised questionnaire and also include in it a summary decision (recommended for publication, recommended for publication with conditions, found unsuitable for publication).
Together with the subsequently reworked text, the authors or editors provide a brief opinion on their changes. Subsequently, the publisher decides on clearance.
Become a reviewer
TU Wien Academic Press is always looking for experts from various disciplines to review and decide on the publication of manuscripts that have been submitted. Please get in touch with us at academicpress@tuwien.ac.at if we may inform you about submitted manuscripts from your field and ask for a review.
Plagiarism check
TU Wien Academic Press subjects all manuscripts to a plagiarism check. We use modern plagiarism software for this purpose that compares the original text with source texts from an extensive database. Should the plagiarism check reveal anything unusual, the authors and editors will be informed, and the texts concerned will be revised or rejected.