ISSN 2619-7219
Publication Ethics
A. PUBLICATION ETHICS
The Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS) is committed to meet the highest standards in research publication. Thus, AJELS is guided by the following principles:
Responsibilities of the Editorial Board
The Editorial Board is responsible for ensuring that the Journal publishes high-quality research and academic papers that are within its scope and objectives; thus, the Editorial Board guarantees that all submitted manuscripts undergo blind peer-review. It is the prime responsibility of the Editorial Board to accept, reject, or recommend a manuscript for revision and resubmission; and such decision is based, to a large extent, upon the recommendations of assigned experts who are part of the International Advisory Board. Likewise, the Editorial Board is responsible for informing authors as regards the status of their submission, regardless of the decision. The Editorial Board may decide to reject a manuscript that violates legal provisions on libel, copyrights, and originality (i.e., plagiarism). Because each paper is prepared for blind peer-review, information with regard to a manuscript must remain confidential until it is finally accepted for publication. Moreover, the views expressed in the articles published in the journal do not reflect the views of the Editorial Board and the International Advisory Board. As an open-access journal, AJELS does not charge any fees for submission or processing of papers for publication.
Responsibilities of the International Advisory Board
The International Advisory Board of AJELS is composed of highly qualified academics from institutions around the globe, who are experts in their respective areas of specialization. These experts, who serve as peer reviewers, assist in the Editorial Board’s decision to accept, reject, or revise and resubmit manuscripts based upon their evaluation and recommendations. Specifically, as reviewers, they are tasked to provide written, unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of a manuscript, assess the clarity and relevance of the writing, and evaluate the paper’s composition, accuracy, originality, and interest to the Journal’s readers. Likewise, they should avoid personal comments or criticism and should maintain the confidentiality of the review process (i.e., not sharing, discussing with third parties, or disclosing information from the reviewed paper).
Responsibilities of the Author
Authors should ensure that manuscripts are prepared for blind peer-review; thus, to facilitate the review process, they should prepare the manuscripts based on the specific information and instructions stated in the Submission Guidelines. The authors must ensure that their papers are original and not plagiarized, and that the sources utilized in the work are properly cited. The authors must submit only previously unpublished work; they must not submit the same manuscript to another journal when it is currently under review by AJELS. Further, they must adhere to the Copyrights provision of the journal if their papers are published by AJELS.
B. COPYRIGHT
The Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS) is an open-access journal. The copyright of a manuscript published by the journal remains with its author/s. The author/s may republish his or her work upon the condition that AJELS is acknowledged as the original publisher.
AJELS and the Department of English of the University of Santo Tomas do not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the articles published.
User License
The content of any manuscript may be reproduced without the author/s’ permission in part or in its entirety provided it is distributed and made available to readers for free, without service charges or any other fees. The author/s further stipulates that the editors, individual writers, and the like all be credited for their work.
Author-journal License
The author/s grants to the journal the right to publish his or her article on the condition that the work will be published under the terms of the aforementioned user license.
C. Funding and Conflict of Interest Statements
In submitting their manuscript to AJELS for possible publication, the authors signify that they agree to the terms and conditions stated in the Journal’s publication ethics statement.
The authors should also include in their manuscript a statement acknowledging any funding support they received for the research and the following ethics declaration statement:
No Conflict of Interest
The authors certify that they are not affiliated with any person or organization with financial or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.
D. Peer Review Policy
All articles submitted to AJELS undergo double blind review. This means both the reviewers and the authors do not know each other’s identities. Identifiers of the authors are removed from the manuscripts for review. Review decisions emailed to the authors do not disclose the name of the assigned reviewers. Doing this helps ensure that review decisions are independent based solely on the merit of the submitted work and guided by the Journal’s rubrics and evaluation guides.
The initial review form for articles and for book reviews and peer review form are used by the associate editors and international advisory board members, respectively. Authors apply their revisions to the most recent version of the manuscript sent back to them and summarize their responses to the reviewers’ comments using the author response form. Upon notification of acceptance, the authors are asked to accomplish the copyright agreement form.
The quality of published articles is safeguarded by the review process illustrated below. The actual processing may vary from the target timeline depending on the volume of submissions and the availability of reviewers. All forms are available here.
Author submits an anonymized manuscript via the AJELS website - Call for Publications page. AJELS sends an email to acknowledge the submission.
Two members of the AJELS Editorial Board review the manuscript. AJELS informs the author about the decision after about two weeks. For provisionally accepted manuscripts, the author/s are given two to four weeks to complete the revisions. The revised manuscript is reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief before it is endorsed for peer review.
Two members of the International Advisory Board specializing in the research topic of the article review the manuscript. AJELS informs the author about the decision after four weeks. For provisionally accepted manuscripts, the author is given two to four weeks to finalize revisions.
After reviewing the final manuscript, AJELS notifies the author via email that the paper has been accepted for publication. Language editing and layout may take two weeks. All articles accepted for the issue are published in December.
e. CITING AN AJELS ARTICLE
When citing a paper published in AJELS as a reference entry, start with the author’s last name followed by initials; publication year in parentheses, followed by a period; title of the article in sentence case, meaning only the first word and the proper nouns in the title are capitalized; name of the journal in title case, followed by the volume number, both in italics; page numbers; then the DOI of the article. An example is presented below.
McLellan, J. (2015). Idioms across languages, and implications for ESL in mother-tongue-based multilingual education contexts. Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 3, 27-41. https://doi.org/10.59960/3.a2.
