Baltic Journal of Real Estate Economics and Construction Management

Allegations of misconduct

BJREECM Journal focuses on the evaluation of a particular case of misconduct following RTU Press Publication Ethics Guidelines and COPE practices. Misconduct includes falsifying data, plagiarizing others’ works, salami publishing and breach of confidentiality. If misconduct is suspected during the review process, the manuscript will be held until any concerns have been resolved. If misconduct is confirmed during the review process, the manuscript will be immediately rejected. If misconduct is proved after publication, then the article will be retracted.
In the case of a suspected misconduct, it has to be reported to the Editor-in-Chief of the BJREECM Journal first. Initial investigation is performed by Editor-in-Chief of the Journal. Confidentiality is observed during the process of collecting information and confirming the proof. In case of minor misconduct investigation is not necessary. In case of serious misconduct, the author has the opportunity to present the explanation. However, the BJREECM Journal reserves the right to speak directly to the author’s institution. If severe misconduct is suspected, RTU Press and RTU Legal Department shall be involved.

Authorship and contributorship

Authors are responsible for ensuring that their works are unique, original, and that they fully acknowledge the source of any content which is not entirely the authors’ own. Authors take the full responsibility to the article. Author is referred as a person, who made a substantial intellectual contribution to the content of the article. Corresponding author is asked to accept and confirm the last version of an article before publication.
The BJREECM Journal Managing Editor will check articles for plagiarism (i.e., reproducing any content without attribution and permission) using Similarity Check (iThenticate tool). The percentage of similarities that may raise a concern is starting from the level of 25% reported by iThenticate tool. More information related to the plagiarism check is described in the subpart “Data and Reproducibility”.
Author Guidelines Template, Guidelines for Reviewers, License to Publish form, Editorial Policy description, Conflict of Interest Disclosure Forms for Editor and Authors are available at the Journal’s webpage. In case of changes of authorship, changes should be confirmed by co-authors, except extraordinary cases, when changes are proved. The reason should be provided to the Editor-in-Chief.
People or organisations that contributed to the paper but are not classified as authors, according to the conducted work, should be listed in the Acknowledgment, along with their contributions. It must be ensured that anyone named in the Acknowledgment agrees to being named.
At the end of the article, authors should provide their short biographies, considering the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union that includes the scientific and/or practical experience and their research interests.
The information we collect is: author’s name, surname; email; affiliation; country; ORCID iD number; number of submission, username (in case of submission through bjreecm-journals.rtu.lv/).

Submissions

Submissions and articles should be written in the English language. Articles can be rejected before peer review in case of low overall quality, if the topic of the research is out of the scope of the Journal, if important sections are missing in an article, or in case any other significant problem appears. All submitted articles must have the innovative significance. The significance of research topic should be explaned in abstract and introductory part of the research paper. The abstract must contain topicallity of the research, aim of the research, used methods of the research and short summary of findings.

Submission Preparation Checklist
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check their submission’s compliance with all of the following items:

- Photos and scanned images (resolution – no less than 300 dpi) in file formats: *.tif, *png, *.jpg,
- Diagrams, charts, schemes in file formats: *.pdf, *.eps, *.cdr, *.xls, *.xlsx, *.dwg as a separate attachment are preferable, but currently are not obligatory.

Information regarding survey of the research can be added as well. It will be a question of discussion and of a particular case to keep it to the original research, or not.

The following list will be useful during the final check of an article prior to the submission. Before sending the manuscript to the Journal for review, author/authors should ensure the following:

• The submission has not been previously published. Please note that all submissions will be checked to prevent plagiarism in published works.
• The text is prepared with a word processor and saved in .DOCX file (MS Office). If only older version of MS Office is available, then save in .DOC format.
• One author has been designated as the corresponding author.
• All authors should provide their e-mail addresses.
• The manuscript has been spell-checked and grammar-checked.
• References are in the correct APA reference format for this Journal. MS Office reference generator or Mendeley tool can be used.
• All references mentioned in the Reference list are cited in the text, and vice versa.
• Author/authors does/do not supply files that are too low in resolution. Authors should submit all images, schemes, diagrams as supplementary files through Open Journal System or in one .zip file.
• The submitted graphics are not disproportionately large for the content.

Authors are requested to submit signed and scanned License to Publish Agreement and Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form filled and signed by each author upon request before the manuscript is published. Editorial Board of BJREECM Journal may ask from Author(s) to send the signed original of the agreement.
Submitted articles should not be published or should not be submitted for publishing to any other journal or publishing house. Articles should not contain illegal, fraudulent or inaccurate/falsificate information. Language should be standard English with appropriate and up-to-date scientific terms used.
Authors should have an approved permission in case of reproduction of any copyright material. If a figure or other graphical material, such as Table, etc., created by another author is used, authors should have a written permission from an author of the original work. Editorial Team may ask for such a proof.

In case, because of the above-mentioned reasons (e.g., reproduction), some costs appeared to the Publisher or Journal, these related costs (losses) can be asked from the autho(s).

Complaints and appeals
In case of the complaints or appeals, they should be written in English and sent electronically to Editor-in-Chief via bjreecm@rtu.lv. Complains should comply with the ethical aspects, and should have the agrumentation or the importance of the raised question. If conflict cannot be solved, it can go to a more senior person to resolution.

Conflicts of interest / Competing interests

RTU Press and BJREECM require that, in accordance with “RTU Press Publication Ethics Guidelines”, the authors of manuscripts submitted for publication declare potential conflict of interests in order to allow editors and reviewers to consider whether it may influence the reviewing of the manuscript.
Having a conflict of interests is not considered as unethical aspect; such interests sometimes are inevitable. Nevertheless, it can directly or indirectly influence the author’s objective interpretation of the results of his/her research or those of others.
Editorial Boards of the BJREECM Journal do not reject papers simply because of the existing conflict of interest and the identification of the conflict of interest does not preclude publication. The declaration of conflict of interests will provide the transparency of interpretation of the results. Editorial independence in the decision-making process on publishing articles is a very important aspect for us and is observed stricly.
Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form for Editor and Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form for Authors are available at Journal’s Sciendo webpage under the section of Supplementary Materials. Please fill in this form, sign it and submit together with your manuscript. The corresponding author fills in the form in the name of co-authors after having received authorisation from them, or they fill it themselves.
In case one of the BJREECM editors or colleagues submit an article, the conflict of interest is prevented. For instance, in case the Editor-in-Chief or some of managing editors make a submission to the BJREECM Journal, the editing process is undertaken by another editor/editorial board member, making the necessary separate subsection notice in the article for this process.

Data and reproducibility

The Editorial Board participates in a growing community of Similarity Check System’s users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy.
Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.
Authors may be asked to provide the data in connection with the research for editorial review.
The number of used references should be appropriate for the study.

Data should be represented accurately, and the work of other authors should be appropriately cited. Plagiarism is a case of miscoduct.
We encourage all researchers to archive and share their data, thus broadening access to the research literature and research results. Authors may place their data available in suitable repositories.

Ethical oversight

The basic ethical oversight is published at RTU Press Publication Ethics Guidelines, in particular adhering to national and international copyright laws. Publishing an article in the BJREECM Journal should be agreed with all co-authors. Plagiarism or self-plagiarism should be avoided. The research should be original and contain elements of scientific innovation. The conflict of interests should be declared.
Researchers should ensure that only those individuals are rewarded with authorship who have made real, creative and substantial contribution to the research. Colleagues who have provided technical assistance (e.g., performing a standard analysis by using standard methods) or prepared figures or did editing should be listed in the Acknowledgement section of the article. Acknowledgement should also be given to individuals whose comments during the preparation of the manuscript have helped to interpret the results of the research.
Authors should declare all possible financial and/or non-financial conflicts of interest.
Authors, editors and reviewers are requested to adhere to the principles of international publishing ethics set out in the COPE Core Practices (publicationethics.org/corepractices).

Plagirism and self-plagiarism are considered to be the unethical publishing behaviour. In case of illegal action detection, the published article can be removed from the publication platform.

Intellectual property

Copyright is a form of intellectual property applicable to certain forms of creative work. Author warrants that the submitted article is original, written by the stated author/s, has not been published before, does not contain unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any thirdparty rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
All articles are published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License.
Information that has been obtained privately (e.g., internal information of a company, which can be classified as a trade secret) can be published only with a permission of the provider of information.
All articles are published in Open Access mandate form, so all articles are available for interested users at Sciendo platform free of charge and can be used for any lawful purpose.
We encourage the authors to share their published research.
Electronic backup is ensured by Sciendo.

Journal management

The BJREECM Journal is published in Open Volume scheduled manner. It allows publishing single articles within an issue as soon as they appear. Articles are published upon Open Access mechanism; the principle that makes research outputs freely available online and supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
The copyediting (proofreading) 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 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.

Article submissions are done to the Journal’s e-mail bjreecm@rtu.lv. OJS system is also available for submissions, by accessing the link bjreecm-journals.rtu.lv/.

The next step is the evalution of articles before the peer review process. This step includes the usage of CrossCheck system. Corrections are asked, if necessary.

If an article is evaluated positively during the first steps, the article is sent to the double-blind peer review process. After double-blind peer review process, the proofreading of the English language and technical proofreading are done in cooperation with RTU Press.
When the corrections are confirmed/accepted by the author, the article is sent for the layout preparation. Final layout version of the article is confirmed by the author.

In case of submission through OJS system (bjreecm-journals.rtu.lv/), copyediting stages include:

• Initial copyedit. The journal copy editors will edit the text to improve flow, clarity, grammar, wording and formatting, equations and formulas, units, as well as including author queries as necessary. In case of submission through OJS system, once the initial edit is complete, the copy editor will upload the revised document through the Journal website (hand notify the author that the edited manuscript is available for review.
• Author copyedit. Before making dramatic departures from the structure and organisation of the edited manuscript, authors must check it with the editors who are co-chairing the piece. Authors should accept/reject any changes made during the initial copyediting, as appropriate, and respond to all queries.
• Final copyedit. The journal copy editor will verify changes made by the author and incorporate the responses to the author queries to create a final manuscript. When finished, the copy editor will upload the final document through the Journal website (bjreecm-journals.rtu.lv/) and alert the layout editor to complete formatting.