Policies

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

A charge of ZAR6,000.00 will be levied on papers accepted for publication to cover costs of open access publication. Where the author’s institution or research budget is unable to meet this charge, it may be waived upon request of the author and at the discretion of the editor.

Copyright & Licensing

Copyright of all work published in SACJ subsists in the authors. While SACJ retains right of first publication, subsequent re-publication is expressly permitted provided the original SACJ publication is acknowledged and cited, according to the terms detailed below. SACJ applies the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all papers published in this journal. Authors who publish with SACJ agree to the following:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant SACJ right of first publication. The work is additionally licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 License (CC BY-NC 4.0) that requires others who share the work to acknowledge the work’s authorship and initial publication in SACJ. Should anyone else wish to make commercial use of the work, SACJ cedes the right to the author to negotiate terms and does not expect to be paid any royalties.
2. Authors may enter into additional arrangements for non-exclusive distribution of the SACJ-published version of the work (e.g., post it to a repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are required to refrain from posting their work online prior to completion of reviews so as not to compromise double-blind reviewing or confuse plagiarism checks.

Digital Preservation Policy

The SACJ utilises both the Portico and the PKP Preservation Network (PN) systems to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. Click here to view SACJ in the Portico Keeper's Registry.

Errata and Retractions Policy

[To be added]

Ethics and Malpractice Statement

[To be added]

Open Access Policy

SACJ is an Open Access journal, supporting the Budapest Open Access Initiative principles: “By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. This can be done without charge and without seeking permission of the publishers or authors. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, is to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” Therefore, copyright remains with the author/s of the article/s.

Peer-review Policy

All articles published undergo a double–blind peer-review process. Author/s are required to provide the editor (in the space allowed for comments on the online submission form) with a list of up to 5 potential reviewers including email addresses, ideally at least one from overseas. For each, indicate why they are suitable. Do not include anyone who has collaborated with any of the authors in the last 5 years. If any reviewer should be excluded inform the editor (in the space allowed for comments on the online submission form) with details including why the reviewer is not suitable.

The author’s name and affiliation should not appear on the title page (or elsewhere). Citing of previous articles by the author should be anonymised if appropriate. Acknowledgments and thanks should not be included in the draft for review. If you use MSWord please make sure that your name and affiliation are not saved in the document properties. In addition to a detailed review, referees may make any of the following decisions, which will be passed on to you by the editor handling your paper, who will balance possibly differing views of the reviewers:

• Accept Submission – there may be minor concerns or corrections
• Revisions Required – concerns or corrections should be checked by the editor before final acceptance
• Resubmit for Review – the paper cannot be published without significant improvements and must go for another round of review (preferably by the same reviewers, if they are still available)
• Decline – the paper is not fit to publish and should not be resubmitted

For Decline and Resubmit for Review you should not submit the paper as a new submission.

Decline means we do not see a way to salvage the paper; at best, it may be suitable to submit elsewhere.

For Resubmit for Review, even if there are substantial changes, the paper should be submitted as another round of submission using the same URL as the original submission.

Proofs of accepted papers will be sent to the corresponding author to ensure that type setting is correct, and not for addition of new material or major amendments to the text. Corrected proofs should be returned to the production editor within three days.

Plagiarism Policy

If plagiarism is detected during review, a paper may be summarily rejected and will not be accepted unless even minor infringements are corrected. Should plagiarism be detected after a paper is published, the editor reserves the right to withdraw a paper from publication. We expect authors to be honest in representing work as their own, and to respect the time and effort our reviewers put in without an undue burden of policing plagiarism, and hence take violations seriously. All submissions are screened through iThenticate.

Self-archiving Policy

Authors may enter into additional arrangements for non-exclusive distribution of the SACJ-published version of the work (e.g., post it to a repository), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. See the registered self-archiving policy on Sherpa Romeo [to be added].

Disclaimer

Neither the editorial staff, the Editorial Board nor the publisher accepts responsibility for opinions or viewpoints expressed, or for the correctness of facts and figures. SAICSIT does not necessarily subscribe to the opinions /conclusions expressed by authors in the journal. Authors carry full responsibility themselves regarding the correctness of their publications.