About the Journal

Aims and Scope

SJUOZ is an official academic journal sponsored by the University of Zakho with p-ISSN: 2663-628X, e-ISSN: 2663-6298 and DOI: doi.org/10.25271/sjuoz. SJUOZ is an international, multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed, double-blind and open-access journal. It publishes original article and reviews in the field of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and computer sciences. The objective of this journal is to publish high quality articles that bring novel insights to the abovementioned disciplines. SJUOZ is also committed in making genuine contributions to the science researches by providing an open access platform.

Section Policies

Articles

✅ Open Submissions; ✅ Indexed; ✅ Peer Reviewed; ✅ double-blind

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted for publication in SJUOZ are strictly and thoroughly peer-reviewed. The review process is double-blind. If the manuscript is accepted for full review, it will be reviewed by a minimum of two external reviewers.

Submitted manuscripts will undergo an initial check including a Plagiarism Check in the Editorial Office. Turnitin software is used to check the plagiarism. An Editor along with the Editorial Office takes charge of the peer-review process. It starts with a preliminary review by the Editor and usually takes 5 working days after manuscript submission).

After the manuscript is accepted for full review, the Editor will send the manuscript to at least two reviews after they accept to review the manuscript and register with the SJUOZ system as a reviewer. After passing 2 – 4 weeks, the Editor will collect the reviewers’ comments and prepare a decision letter based on the comments of the reviewers. The decision letter will be sent to the Corresponding Author to request an adequate action. In addition, the Authors will see the reviewers’ comments and the decision letter in their account page at the SJUOZ system. In the case of the acceptance, the author will be asked to format the manuscript according to SJUOZ template before it goes into typesetting and proofreading with the publisher. The author will receive the paper in PDF produced by SJUOZ for checking before it is published online. In brief, the review process at SJUOZ and details of the submitted manuscript are stated below.
Preliminary review

decision: accepted for review or
decision: pre-rejected

reviewer selection
writing the decision letter including

comments from reviewers
Editor's comments
Editor's decision about the next status of the manuscript:

decision: accepted or
decision: to be resubmitted or
decision: to be revised or
decision: rejected.

What should be considered?

Let the editor know if your expertise and/or fields of interest cover the topic of the manuscript.
Decline an invitation to review if there is a conflict of interest with one of the authors. Conflicts of interest may include relationships with academic advisors and/ or advisees, anyone at your current institution, members of your family, or people with whom you have collaborated during the last ten years.
When declining a review, feel free to provide the contact information of a person who would be qualified to review the manuscript.
Upon accepting an invitation, you will have two weeks to complete your review. Reviewers that don’t reply on time will be excluded from the Database of Reviewers.

Publication Frequency

SJUOZ first started publication with 2 issues per year in 2013. In 2016, after frequent submission to the journal, SJUOZ had become quarterly. Accepted papers are published online ahead of print.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...

Publication Ethics

Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

The publication of an article in the peer-reviewed journal SJUOZ is to support the standard and respected knowledge transfer network. Our publication ethics and publication malpractice statement is mainly based on the Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors (Committee on Publication Ethics, 2011) that includes;

General duties and responsibilities of editors.
Relations with readers.
Relations with authors.
Relations with editors.
Relations with editorial board members.
Relations with journal owners and publishers.
Editorial and peer review processes.
Protecting individual data.
Encouraging ethical research (e.g. research involving humans or animals).
Dealing with possible misconduct.
Ensuring the integrity of the academic record.
Intellectual property.
Encouraging debate.
Complaints.
Conflicts of interest.

Informed Consent

Obtaining informed consent is a basic ethical obligation and a legal requirement for researchers. An informed consent document is typically used to provide subjects with the information they need to make a decision to volunteer for a research study. This information is most often presented subjects in the form of a written document, but may also be offered verbally by a member of the study team or in some other format understandable to the subject. Regulations and policy require that certain information be provided as part of the consent process. For the research papers that include volunteer as a part of the research (e.g. medical research papers), Authors must provide documents that clearly indicate the informed consent issue.

Human and Animal Research

Studies involving humans, the authors must adhere to the code of ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for medical research involving human subjects . Regarding the animal studies, the following points must be adhered;

For research conducted on regulated animals (which includes all live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates), appropriate approval must have been obtained according to either international or local laws and regulations. Before conducting the research, approval must have been obtained from the relevant body (in most cases an Institutional Review Board, or Ethics Committee). The authors must provide an ethics statement as part of their Methods section detailing full information as to their approval (including the name of the granting organization, and the approval reference numbers). If an approval reference number is not provided, written approval must be provided as a confidential supplemental information file. Research on non-human primates is subject to specific guidelines from the Weatherall (2006) report (The Use of Non-Human Primates in Research).
For research conducted on non-regulated animals, a statement should be made as to why ethical approval was not required.
Experimental animals should have been handled according to the highest standards dictated by the author’s institution.
We strongly encourage all authors to comply with the 'Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments' (ARRIVE) guidelines, developed by NC3Rs.
Articles should be specific in descriptions of the organism(s) used in the study. The description should indicate strain names when known.

Privacy Statement

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.

Publication Fees

This journal charges the following author fees.

Article Publication:
If the paper is accepted for publication, you will be asked to pay an Article Publication Fee to cover publication costs. The cost of Article Publication Fee is 150,000 ID. However, the publication is free for international authors.