General informacion

Journal of Engineering Management and Competitiveness (JEMC) is an open access, single-blind peer-review journal in the field of Engineering Management published by the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. The journal is published two times a year. It publishes articles based on researches undertaken by academics and professionals and includes topics such as:

  • Engineering Management and Management (in general),
  • Innovation Management,
  • Quality Management,
  • SMEs and Entrepreneurship,
  • Strategic and Operation Management, 
  • Logistics, 
  • Risk Management,
  • Human Resource Management,
  • Knowledge Management,
  • Environmental Protection and Improvement Management,
  • Customer Relationship Management,
  • E-business,
  • Competitiveness and competitive factors, 
  • Marketing Management in SMEs sector, 
  • Service Management.

General policy

JEMC full original papers that have not been published previously. In those cases where the paper has been presented at a Conference, it can be published in Journal if it has not been published in generally available conference materials and/or if it has not been published in its entirety.

The papers submitted can belong to one of the following categories: Original Scientific Paper, Review Paper, Presentation and/or book review. JEMC is an Open Access (OA) journal. Indexing in DOAJ brings to Journal a higher level trustability, while ensuring additional visibility to both our papers and their authors.

Contributions to journal must be in English. Authors from Serbia should supy manuscripts with Title, Abstract, and Keywords on serbian language, utilizing Latin scrip.

The Journal is issued two times a year.

The aim is to encourage authors from the Western Balkan Region, and beyond, to represent, discuss and share the results of scientific researches, analyze theoretical basis, and give examples of business practices in  engineering management in order to achieve and maintain business excellence and competitive ability. Although the focus, all the other researches from the field of engineering management including multidisciplinary approach are welcome.

Editorial Issues and Responsibilities

The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to JEMC will be published. The Editor is guided by the policies of the journal's Editorial Board and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Editors must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. If an Editor feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the paper shall be made by the Editorial Board.

Editors shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor’s own research without the express written consent of the author.

To maintain the focus and scope of JEMC, the Editorial encourages authors to identify past articles which have been published in the Journal, fits with the subject area of the manuscript. This helps the Editorial to determine the suitability of the manuscripts to JEMC.

Authors’ responsibilities

Authors warrant that their manuscriptis their original work that it has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The Authors also warrant that the manuscript is not and will not be published elsewhere (after the publication in JEMC) in any language without the consent of the copyright holder.

Authors warrant that the rights of third parties will not be violated, and that the publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions, the validity of the experimental results and must make sure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the data public.

Authors wishing to include figures or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s) and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Authors must make sure that all only contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that papers submitted to JEMC are written with ethical standards in mind and that they not contain plagiarism. Authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of others.

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal Editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.

Peer-review process

The submitted manuscripts are subject to a peer-review process. The purpose of peer review is to assists the Đ•ditor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author it may also assist the author in improving the paper. JEMC utilizes a single-blind peer-review by two experts to review submitted manuscripts; all of the reviewers of a paper remain anonymous to the authors before, during and after the evaluation process.

During submittion, authors have the right to propose one or more independent reviewers in the subject area.

The choice of reviewers is at the editors' discretion. The reviewers must be knowledgeable about the subject area of the manuscript; they must not be from the authors' own institution and they should not have recent joint publications with any of the authors.

Reviewers must not have conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editor without delay.

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents.

An acknowledgment e-mail regarding the receipt of manuscript will be promptly sent by the editorial. Upon receipt, manuscripts are be pre-evaluated at the Editorial Office in order to check whether they meet the basic publishing requirements and quality standards. They are also screened for plagiarism. Reviewers are selected from the Editorial Board of the Journal or qualified outside reviewers. The selection is based upon the particular area of expertise of the reviewers matched to the subject matter of the submission. In the main review phase, the Editor sends submitted papers and reviewers form to the reviewers. The reviewers form contains a checklist in order to help referees cover all aspects that can decide the fate of a submission. In the final section of reviewers form, the reviewers must include observations and suggestions aimed at improving the submitted manuscript. The reviewers form are sent to authors along with the decisions concerning the articles. The review process may take place in a few iterations (cycles), depending on the reviewers recommendations and editors' decisions.

The review process will be done as quickly as possible, and the corresponding author will be notified concerning the possibility of publication of the manuscript as soon as the review process is completed. Before the review process, professional proofreading and language editing takes place.

All correspondence will be directed to the corresponding author of multi-authored manuscripts. The corresponding author is responsible for communication with manuscript co-authors to obtain final materials and copyright agreement signatures. Upon acceptation of the manuscript for publication, it will be typeset. After typesetting, to the corresponding author will be sent the proof of manuscript. Authors will be asked to check the proofs carefully, correct any typographical errors and authorize the publication of the corrected proofs within no more than 5 days.

All of the reviewers of a paper act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities. If the decisions of the two reviewers are not the same (accept/reject), the Editor may assign additional reviewers.

The Editorial team shall ensure reasonable quality control for the reviews. With respect to reviewers whose reviews are convincingly questioned by authors, special attention will be paid to ensure that the reviews are objective and high in academic standard. When there is any doubt with regard to the objectivity of the reviews or quality of the review, additional reviewers will be assigned.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other creative expression as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism may constitute the following:

  • Word for word, or almost word for word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);
  • Copying equations, figures or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism. Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected.

In case plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described under Retraction policy.

Retraction Policy

Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as long as it is possible. However, very occasionally, circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistake while preserving the integrity of science; it is not to punish the author.

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Journal of Engineering Management and Competitiveness (JEMC): in the electronic version of the retraction note, a link is made to the original article. In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged; save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “RETRACTED”.

Open Access Policy

The published articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA). It is allowed to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided, it is indicated if changes were made and the new work is distributed under the same license as the original. Users are required to provide full bibliographic description of the original publication (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages), as well as its DOI code. In electronic publishing, users are also required to link the content with both the original article published in Journal of Engineering Management and Competitiveness (JEMC) and the licence used. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

There are no APC (Article Processing Charge) for having a paper published in JEMC.

Self-archiving Policy

JEMC allows authors to deposit Author's Post-print (accepted version) and Publisher's version/PDFin an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, such as PubMed Central, Europe PMC, arXiv, etc. or to publish it on Author's personal website and departmental website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), at any time after publication. Publisher copyright and source must be acknowledged and a link must be made to the article's DOI or URL.

Copyright

Once the manuscript is accepted for publication, authors shall transfer the copyright to the Publisher - to the corresponding author will be forward “Copyright Transfer Agreement”, that should be signed and sent back to the Journal. Upon transfer of the copyright to the publisher, no part of the manuscript may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. If the submitted manuscript is not accepted for publication by the journal, all rights shall be retained by the author(s).

Authors grant to the Publisher the following rights to the manuscript, including any supplemental material, and any parts, extracts or elements thereof:

  • the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript in printed form, including print-on-demand;
  • the right to produce prepublications, reprints, and special editions of the Manuscript;
  • the right to translate the Manuscript into other languages;
  • the right to reproduce the Manuscript using photomechanical or similar means including, but not limited to photocopy, and the right to distribute these reproductions;
  • the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript electronically or optically on any and all data carriers or storage media – especially in machine readable/digitalized form on data carriers such as hard drive, CD-Rom, DVD, Blu-ray Disc (BD), Mini-Disk, data tape – and the right to reproduce and distribute the Article via these data carriers;
  • the right to store the Manuscript in databases, including online databases, and the right of transmission of the Manuscript in all technical systems and modes;
  • the right to make the Manuscript available to the public or to closed user groups on individual demand, for use on monitors or other readers (including e-books), and in printable form for the user, either via the internet, other online services, or via internal or external networks.