Publishing with the University of Lapland

A journal must always have

• a title
• a publisher
• an ISSN
• an editor-in-chief and editorial staff

In the case of a Finnish, peer-reviewed scholarly journal, the publisher should apply for permission to use the label  to mark the peer-reviewed articles in the journal. There are public criteria for using that label and an external body (TSV) gives approval when the criteria are met.

The editorial staff/board of a peer-reviewed journal must consist of academically competent members from several research organizations. The reviewers must not be from the same organization as the author(s) and they must not have co-published with the author(s).

The peer-reviewing process must always be carried out in writing. Furthermore, regarding the process and any rejected material, all the correspondence, evaluation statements, author responses, article versions, etc. must be stored to ensure the validity of the review and the legal protection of the authors. Peer reviewing must always involve the possibility to reject a manuscript if it does not meet the prescribed criteria.

An individual university, faculty, institute, etc. should not be used as a scientific publisher. To qualify, the publisher must be e.g. a scholarly society, publishing house, a consortium of several organizations, or a publisher sufficiently independent of an individual research organization.

A peer-reviewed journal must strive to list its articles in one or several databases from which people typically search for scholarly articles: Finnish journals in the Arto database and English journals in international databases.

If a journal is published as a web publication

• each article must be stored as a separate file with machine-searchable metadata
• each article must have its own, permanent identification (URN or DOI) with permanent address linking to it
• the journal should apply for acceptance to DOAJ
• electronic journals should be run on a proper platform for e-publishing. The platform should have standard open interfaces for big scientific search robots to find the articles and their metadata. A common web site is not suitable for that.
• the right for using the articles should be clearly expressed with common licensing system, e.g. Creative Commons

The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies is keeping up a system for publishing electronic journals. The service can be used for a small fee even by other scientific publishers than the scientific societies.