Editorial Policies

Aims and Scope

Frontier Materials & Technologies (before 2021 - Science Vector of Togliatti State University) is a peer-reviewed journal that is devoted to publishing research papers by Russian and foreign researchers in Russian and English to share expertise and advances in theory and practice.

The scopes of the journal include Mechanical Engineering & Machine Science and Metallurgy & Materials Science. Authors are encouraged to submit:

• original research papers reflecting research and its methods, results, discussion and conclusions;
• reviews featuring new advances in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering.

The journal aims to:

• publish original papers reflecting open research results, theoretical and empirical research in Russian and English;
• inform the international and Russian scientific communities of urgent and promising research topics in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering;
• integrate papers into international environment and attract international authors and readers interested in the topics of the journal.

The publications might be of interest to the researchers who are aspiring to be aware of Russia’s and world’s latest scientific developments and share their research results with the academic community, and academics interested in new advances in the treatment of metals and alloys, the optimization of technological processes, the improvement of equipment wear resistance etc.

Sections

Peer Review Process

Every article submitted to Frontier Materials & Technologies is subject to peer review.

The single blind peer review ensures that the identity of the reviewer is not disclosed. The author can find out the reviewer’s name only in case the reviewer provides his/her written consent. In order to enhance the quality of the peer review, the chief editor may involve other referees into working on the review without disclosing their names. A copy of a review can be obtained at the request to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.

A review is written in compliance with the journal's guidelines and must contain a detailed reasoning of the reviewer's decision. A review must contain comments on the following issues:

• scientific novelty of the paper and its contribution to science;
• relevance of the reviewed literature in the context of recent advances in the current scholarship;
• merits and flaws of the manuscript.

A reviewer submits the review with the electronic copy of the manuscript to the editorial email vektornaukitgu@yandex.ru in the allotted time, but not later than within 21 days of the date of receiving the manuscript for peer review. A reviewer responds without delay to the journal in case the authors have questions concerning reviewer's comments and recommendations.

A reviewer is to make one of the following publication recommendations: accept; accept with minor amendments; require revising and resubmitting the article for the second round of peer review; reject. A review must substantiate the reviewer's decision to accept the article with minor amendments or reject it. The reviewer's objective is to provide an unbiased, solid and clearly presented opinion on the article's quality. It is mandatory that a reviewer follows the reviewer ethic principles stated in Publishing Ethics throughout the peer review process.

A final acceptance/rejection decision is made by the chief editor.

All reviews are deposited in the electronic archive of the journal for 5 years.

OUR REVIEWERS

Any external specialists with the Candidate of Sciences or Doctor of Sciences degree can become peer reviewers in case they have published in accredited scientific journals on the corresponding topic for the past 3 years. Members of the Editorial Board can be peer reviewers.

BECOME A REVIEWER

Our journal is seeking the authors willing to become reviewers. Submit a statement describing your areas of interest and expertise to vektornaukitgu@yandex.ru. Put "Become a reviewer" in the subject field. Your application will be considered by the chief editor.

Publication Frequency

4 times a year (March 31, June 30, September 30, December 30)

Open Access Policy

Frontier Materials & Technologies is an open access journal. All articles are made freely available to readers immediatly upon publication.

Archiving

The journal uses the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) to digitally preserve all the published articles. The PKP PN is a part of LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program offers decentralized and distributed preservation, seamless perpetual access, and preservation of the authentic original version of the content.

Other sources:

• Russian State Library (RSL)
• Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY.RU
• National Electronic-Information Consortium (NEICON)

Authors are allowed to deposit all versions of their work in an institutional or other repository of their choice.

Consideration for Publication

The Editorial Board accepts only original work that follows the requirements and guidelines of the journal.
Authors are responsible for the content of the manuscript. The manuscript must be original, and it has not been published previously or it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The manuscript can be rejected or sent to authors to be revised if it does not follow the requirements and guidelines of the journal.
The manuscript must include a letter from the organization recommending the manuscript for publication, an expert review allowing research results to be published open access and the signed Author’s Declaration (Author’s Declaration template). Authors are required to email PDF files of the letter, the expert review and Author’s Declaration to vektornaukitgu@yandex.ru.

Frontier Materials & Technologies is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license. For more information, please visit Open Access to publications increases their citation rate.

WHAT IS A GOOD MANUSCRIPT?

It presents novel scientific knowledge, and it has not been published previously.
It is of interest to the researchers in the fields of Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering, the treatment of metals and alloys, the optimization of technological processes, the improvement of equipment wear resistance etc.
It contains details of the methods or techniques to permit others to replicate the work. The results are sufficient, and they are analyzed and compared to the results obtained by other researchers. The conclusions are based on evidence and result from the research.
It follows the ethical guidelines of the journal.

WHY IS THE MANUSCRIPT MORE LIKELY TO BE REJECTED?

• Its topic is not within the aims and scope of the journal.
• It is based on plagiarism and self-plagiarism, or it involves violating copyright and falsifying data or results.
• It has a poor or wrong structure.
• Authors do not explain their work so readers cannot understand it.
• It does not present scientific novelty.
• It does not contain enough citations to up to date literature.
• It contains theories, conceptions or conclusions that are not based on sufficient evidence.
• It does not contain sufficient details of the methods or techniques to permit others to replicate the work.
• It does not clearly describe or explain the hypothesis being tested, or it does not contain samples of statistical data or experiments.
• It does not clearly describe the experiments, or it contains major methodological mistakes, or it does not contain accurate statistical analysis.
• It is written in poor English.

Publishing Ethics

Ethical lines of journal policy

The Editorial Bound of journal Frontier Materials & Technologies is guided in practice by the publication ethical lines developed on the base of following international standards, as the:

• principles accepted on the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity (Singapore, July 22–24, 2010);
• principles developed by The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE);
• regulations of the Chapter 70 “Copyright” from the Civil Code of the Russian Federation.

Ethical responsibilities of Editors

The editor-in-chief and deputies have extraordinary rights to accept or reject a manuscript for publishing. Editors guarantee permanently compliance with:

• manuscript observing ethics;
• high quality of accepted papers;
• considering various scientific misconducts;
• copyright adherence;
• confidention.

Ethical responsibilities of Reviewers

Reviewers have the following responsibilities:

• confidention adherence – to treat the manuscript and the review process as confidential, neither the identity of the reviewer nor any other details of the review process may be revealed to third parties, not to use information gained in confidence from submitted, unpublished articles for their own research;
• objectivity adherence – to avoid personal criticism, but to focus on the content of the manuscript;
• to alert the editor if there is any indication of potential ethical problems, and to address the other reviewer;
• impartiality adherence – to base decisions on the scientific merits of the work, without regard to institutional affiliation, nationality, race, gender, age, or other personal circumstances of the authors;
• sources admission adherence – to inform the editor of missing references and any similarity between the submitted manuscript and work that is already published or under consideration at other sources.

The Editors preserve confidentiality of reviewers personal data.

Ethical responsibilities of Authors

All authors are accountable for the content of the manuscript.

The data of manuscript has to be original and never submitted or published before in other journals.

The author must guarantee:

• presentation of work results in an honest way;
• giving due acknowledgement to all contributors;
• presence of references for all sources;
• absence of self-plagiarism by papers published before;
• presentation of corresponding authors as all persons who contributed significantly to the research and paper compilation;
• revelation of potential conflicts of interest (such as presented information about obtained grants and other funding sources);
• fast line with editor for expeditious correction or paper rejection, if some kind of failure or misconduct was discovered.

Ethical Guidelines

The ethical standards of the journal are based on the principles of Committee on Publication Ethics.

In disputed situations, the editorial board is guided by the COPE guidelines.
Frontier Materials & Technologies follows the criteria for authorship specified in Responsibilities of the Parties Involved in Manuscript Publication of the Editorial Policies. Any researcher involved in the research planning or execution cannot be excluded from the list of authors and has the right to take part in the preparing a draft or a final version of the article.

ORIGINALITY OF SUBMITTED WORK

The submitted material must be original and not previously published elsewhere, in whole or in part in other languages, and must not be under consideration by any other journal. If the manuscript presents the results used for the preparation of other manuscripts in which the authors were designated as co-authors, the authors must inform the editors and provide links to such articles. If the manuscript contains materials previously published by the authors, this should be specified in the text of the article and references to previously published works should be given.
In exceptional cases, we can accept a manuscript that has been previously published in other languages only if the information it contains is extremely important and needs to be spread as widely as possible. In this case the journal that has initially published the work is to give its permission for republication. Such article must contain an explicit reference to the original.
Manuscripts that present a reanalysis of previously published data must include a reference to the original work.

SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT

The manuscript should give a comprehensive account of the test and research methods used by the authors while conducting the research. References to previously published standards shall be permitted. If the methodology is the original one and has not previously been published, it should be presented as comprehensively as possible. If the methodology has been previously published, it is sufficient to abstract it with references to previous publications. This is necessary to ensure reproducibility of test and research results as well as to confirm the validity of scientific results.

AUTHORSHIP CONFLICTS

The determination of authorship is the prerogative of the team of authors who worked on the manuscript. It is not the role of the Editorial Board to determine who qualifies or disqualifies for authorship.
Violation of crediting authorship occurs in case of the unreasoned removal/addition of an author from/to the list of authors. Manuscript submission without receiving consent from each listed author can be also regarded as violation of crediting authorship.
In case of authorship conflicts the Editor-in-Chief reserves a right to refuse publication.

PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is the unreferenced use of other’s published and unpublished ideas, thoughts, expressions or other intellectual property without their permission or acknowledgment and/or the representation of them as one's own original work. If plagiarism is detected, the manuscript is subject to rejection and the Editorial Board will issue a warning to the research institution the author is affiliated with. If certain techniques to conceal plagiarism are found, the article will be rejected and subsequent papers by the same author will not be accepted for publication in the journal for 5 years.
Self-plagiarism is reusing the text from his or her own published work as well as changing the text of the article without improving its informative value in comparison with the previously published work. The submission of a manuscript that contains data presented in the dissertation that has been defended before is also attributed as self-plagiarism. The Editorial Board considers that the results of the dissertation should be published before the dissertation defense, not afterwards.
Frontier Materials & Technologies use native Russian-language plagiarism detection software Antiplagiat to screen the submissions. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.

DATA FALSIFICATION

Falsification of data is fabrication or intentional distortion/concealment of data that contradict to author’s hypothesis or conclusions. If fabrication or intentional data distortion are detected, the manuscript will be refused and the Editorial Board will inform about the case the academic institution the authors are affiliated with.

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS

A conflict of interests arises when a researcher’s professional judgment is influenced by a secondary interest, such as family ties, personal financial interests, academic competition or opposing scientific views. Authors are requested to disclose potential conflicts of interests so that readers could recognize biases in their work. If a conflict of interests is declared, it will be published along with the article in a special section. If a conflict of interests is discovered after manuscript publication, the journal will publish this information separately, and the authors will be required to submit an explanation letter to the Editorial Board.

ARTICLE RETRACTION

If the Editorial Board has any concerns about the ethical aspect of the publication, it can contact the research institution that carried out or hosted the study to clarify all the circumstances. If the doubts are confirmed, the article will be retracted. The following reasons can be also regarded as grounds for retraction:

• Plagiarism discovery after publication of an article
• Redundant publications (republishing of an article in another journal)
• Finding major errors in a published article that can dispute its scientific value
• Reproducing materials and data without obtaining permission
• Copyright infringement
• Undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Responsibilities of the Parties Involved in Manuscript Publication

RESPONSIBILITIES OF AUTHORS

Identification of authors is the responsibility of the people who did the work. Authors should not expect the Editorial Board to become embroiled in disputes and conflicts among authors.
Criteria for authorship

• he/she has made a substantial contribution to the work or the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data for the work;
• he/she has participated in writing the original draft of the manuscript or revising the manuscript;
• he/she has participated in approval of the final version of the manuscript;
• he/she has agreed to take responsibility for all aspects of the research.

Individuals who have participated in other aspects of the research but do not meet the criteria for authorship and therefore cannot be designated as authors of the manuscript should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.
Note: When authorship changes after the manuscript has been submitted, authors must provide notice of this change, stating which author is being added or removed. It must be a written consent of all authors, including those being added or removed.
Note: The author(s) should obtain written consents of all the individuals or organizations to be acknowledged. The consents do not have to be submitted with the manuscript, and they should be sent upon request.
Authors should adhere to the ethical guidelines of the journal and disclose the conflicts of interests.
The author who is responsible for communicating with the journal is a corresponding author. The corresponding author should respond to the letters from the journal within five days, otherwise the manuscript can be rejected.
Frontier Materials & Technologies is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license. For more information, please visit.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF PEER REVIEWERS

Confidentiality: Peer reviewers cannot disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone before its publication. The research results and ideas obtained through peer review must not be used in a peer reviewer’s own research before the manuscript is published.
Standards of Objectivity: Peer reviewers must be polite, and their peer reviews must contain no personal criticism of authors and be conducted objectively. Peer reviewers must be unbiased and evaluate the manuscript for its scientific content regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethics origin, citizenship or political views of the author(s).
Conflict of Interest: If peer reviewers discover a conflict of interest, they must notify the editor-in-chief to be excused from the review process.
Acknowledgment of Sources: Peer reviewers should identify the works that have not been cited by authors. If peer reviewers find any substantial similarity between the submitted manuscript and any other published work, they must notify the editor-in-chief promptly.
Punctuality: A peer review must be prepared according to the journal standards within the time agreed.
Peer reviewers must respond to each question related to their reviews.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF EDITORS

The Editorial Board must ensure confidentiality of the process of manuscript preparation for publication. Before submitting a manuscript for independent peer reviewing, all information about the author(s) of the study that may indicate their identity will be removed from the manuscript. Anonymous manuscripts are assigned a number for identification within the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board requires the peer reviewer to ensure confidentiality if he/she has identified the author from the List of References. Ideas expressed in manuscripts submitted for peer reviewing cannot be made public by the editorial staff.
The Editorial Board must strictly observe the rules of reviewing. Reviewers are to be selected strictly according to the criteria given.
Manuscripts rejected before being sent for peer reviewing are deleted from the journal’s database. Manuscripts rejected as a result of peer reviewing are stored in our database together with the reviews for 5 years.
All manuscripts should be given a timely peer review. Any delay should be agreed upon with the authors. In case the publication is rejected, the editors should notify the authors as early as possible.
Note: The Editor-in-Chief is the only person responsible for the content of the journal and the publication of manuscripts. By the decision of the Editor-in-Chief, an article that has received negative feedback from peer reviewers may still be published.
Unintended mistakes are a part of the publication process. The Editorial Board is obliged to publish information about identified inaccuracies in an article right after they are detected.
The procedure for refusing (retracting) publication is established by the ethical guidelines of the journal.

Alteration of Published Article

Erratum

An erratum refers to a correction of errors introduced to the article by the publisher. All publisher-introduced changes are highlighted to the author at the proof stage and any errors are ideally identified by the author and corrected by the publisher before final publication.

Corrigendum

A corrigendum refers to a change to their article that the author wishes to publish at any time after acceptance. Authors should contact the editor of the journal, who will determine the impact of the change and decide on the appropriate course of action.

Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.

Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

Plagiarism detection

"Frontier Materials & Technologies" use native russian-language plagiarism detection software Antiplagiat to screen the submissions. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.

Manuscript Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online:

• by emailing to vektornaukitgu@yandex.ru;
• by uploading to the submission system at our website.

Either way is appropriate.

To contact tech support, please email to vektornaukitgu@yandex.ru.

Author fees

There are no publication fees or fees payable to authors.

All manuscripts must be submitted by an author and cannot be submitted by a third party or an agent. The manuscripts are published only within the specified time period.

The journal offers no fee-based service. Attempting to offer a fee to a journal employee constitutes unethical behavior, and the manuscript is immediately rejected.

Revenue Sources

The publication of the journal is financed by the funds of the parent organization.