Journal of Balkan Libraries Union (BLUJ) is a double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal covering theories, concepts, models, frameworks, and philosophies in library science, e-publishing, documentation, and information science. BLUJ publishes research articles, review/survey articles, short communications, book reviews, and letters to the editor. BLUJ's scope is broadly library science, encompassing all of the academic and professional disciplines which deal with recorded information. These include, but are not limited to information science, library science, and related disciplines, knowledge management, knowledge organization, information seeking, information retrieval, human information behaviour, and digital literacy.
The practice of peer review is to ensure that only good science is published. It is an objective process at the heart of good scholarly publishing and is carried out by all reputable scientific journals. Our referees play a vital role in maintaining the high standards of Journal of Balkan Libraries Union (BLUJ) and all manuscripts are peer reviewed following the procedure outlined below.
Initial manuscript evaluation
An Editor first evaluates all manuscripts. It is rare, but it is possible for an exceptional manuscript to be accepted at this stage. Manuscripts rejected at this stage are insufficiently original, have serious scientific flaws, have poor grammar or English language, or are outside the aims and scope of the journal. Those that meet the minimum criteria are normally passed on to at least 2 experts for review. Authors of manuscripts rejected at this stage will usually be informed within 2 weeks of receipt.
Type of peer review
BLUJ employs double blind reviewing, where both the referee and author remain anonymous throughout the process.
How the referee is selected
Whenever possible, referees are matched to the paper according to their expertise. Our database is constantly being updated. We welcome suggestions for referees from the author though these recommendations are not necessarily used.
Referee reports
Referees are asked to evaluate whether the manuscript:
– Is original
– Is methodologically sound
– Follows appropriate ethical guidelines
– Has results which are clearly presented and support the conclusions
– Correctly references previous relevant work
Language correction is not part of the peer review process, but referees may, if so wish, suggest corrections to the manuscript.
How long does the review process take?
The time required for the review process is dependent on the response of the referees. However, the typical time for BLUJ is approximately 4-8 weeks. Should the referees' reports contradict one another or a report is unnecessarily delayed, a further expert opinion will be sought. In rare cases for which it is extremely difficult to find a second referee to review the manuscript, or when the one referee's report has thoroughly convinced the Editor, decisions at this stage to accept, reject or ask the author for a revision are made on the basis of only one referee's report. The Editor's decision will be sent to the author with recommendations made by the referees, which usually includes verbatim comments by the referees. Revised manuscripts might be returned to the initial referees who may then request another revision of a manuscript.
Final report
A final decision to accept or reject the manuscript will be sent to the author along with any recommendations made by the referees, and may include verbatim comments by the referees.
The Editor's decision is final
Referees advise the Editor, who is responsible for the final decision to accept or reject the article.
Being a nonprofit journal, Journal of Balkan Libraries Union does NOT charge publication/processing fees from the Author(s).
Online submission and review of manuscripts is mandatory for all types of papers. Please prepare your manuscript following the instructions for authors given below before submitting it online. Please write your text in good English (American or British usage is accepted, but not a mixture of these). The template of the journal can be downloaded using the following link:
http://balkanlibraries.org/frontend/document/BLUJ_template.doc
Journal of Balkan Libraries Union is a participant of CrossCheck, a service offered by CrossRef and powered by iThenticate software. iThenticate is a plagiarism screening service that verifies the originality of written work. Using iThenticate, all submissions are checked against millions of published, scholarly works, and billions of web content.
This journal permits and encourages authors to post items submitted to the journal on personal websites or institutional repositories both prior to and after publication, while providing bibliographic details that credit, if applicable, its publication in this journal.Balkan Libraries Union & Trakya UniversityJournal of Balkan Libraries Union is committed towards open access publishing mode and it support open access in all forms. We have signed in the Budapest open access initiative to show our commitment towards open access publishing. If the author(s) are new to open access publishing mode they are informed to read the articles and website based information related to open access publishing mode which is revolutionising the publishing industry in the recent decade. Some of the resources are available at
1) Peter Suber's 'Open Access Overview'
2) SHERPA’s – Authors and open access
3) Open access ( Wikipedia)
4) Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
5) Budapest Open Access Initiative
Open access publishing model is an established publishing mode that provides immediate, worldwide, barrier-free access to the full text of research articles without requiring a subscription to the particular journal in which these articles are published. Mostly in this model, the publication costs including article processing cost are usually covered by the author’s institution or research funds or by the author(s) themselves. Open access charges replace subscription charges allow the publishers to make the article freely available to all interested readers to download and distribute the published article. Other than the initial publication charges paid for open access journals are no different from the normal subscription based journals and they adopt the same peer-review system to identify the suitability of the particular article to get published, they even undergo better quality control as any other scholarly journal.
Advantages of Open access publishing through us are
All articles published through our journal adopting Open Access Publishing policy based on Creative Commons Attribution License. This means that all articles published in our journals, including any data, graphics and supplements, can be linked from outside in, crawled by search engines, re-used by text mining applications or websites, blogs, repositories etc. free of charge under the sole condition of proper accreditation of the source, original author(s) and original Publisher.
Copyright and License
Copyright of any article(s) published through our journal are owned and retained by the concerned author(s). Authors grant the publisher a license to publish the article and identify the Balkan Libraries Union as the original publisher. Authors also grant any third party, the right to use their article freely as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and original publisher are identified.
Author(s) certification
In submitting a research article ('article') to Journal of Balkan Libraries Union authors are requested to certify that:
They are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
Reprints and permissions
All research articles published through our journals are made available and publicly accessible via the Internet without any restrictions or payment to be made by the user. PDF versions of all research articles are available freely for download by any reader who intent to download it. This is a convenient way for users to print high quality copies of articles.
Figures and tables
Reproduction of figures or tables is permitted free of charge and without formal written permission from the publisher or the copyright holder as per the Creative Commons License, provided that the figure/table is original and prepared by the concerned author(s). Some articles that are published through Journal of Balkan Libraries Union may contain figures, tables or text taken from other publications, for which we does not hold the copyright or the right to re-license the published material. Please note that the concerned person(s) should inquire with the original copyright holder who will be mostly the publisher or original author, if that material can be further re-used.
The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.Copyright © 2013 Balkan Libraries Union - All rights reserved.The copyediting stage is intended to improve the flow, clarity, grammar, wording, and formatting of the article. It represents the last chance for the author to make any substantial changes to the text because the next stage is restricted to typos and formatting corrections. The file to be copyedited is in Word or .rtf format and therefore can easily be edited as a word processing document. The set of instructions displayed here proposes two approaches to copyediting. One is based on Microsoft Word's Track Changes feature and requires that the copy editor, editor, and author have access to this program. A second system, which is software independent, has been borrowed, with permission, from the Harvard Educational Review. The journal editor is in a position to modify these instructions, so suggestions can be made to improve the process for this journal.