Editorial Policies

Aims and Scope

• unique materials (documents and photos) from Russian and international archives, related to the life and work of Dostoevsky, his relatives and acquaintances;
• manuscripts by Dostoevsky  and his contemporaries with chronological attribution, interpretation of the faded, strikethrough and illegible records;
• epistolary legacy of Dostoevsky and the previously unpublished letters of his correspondents (with textological reports, comments and dating);
• attribution of the letters of Dostoevsky’s anonymous correspondents ;
• new facts and assumptions regarding the writer’s biography;
• various viewpoints, criticism of critical writings, criticism of myths, pro and contra debates;
• archival data and genealogical research (study of parish registers, bulletins, official lists, personal records etc.);
• shorthand notes of the writer’s wife, their decryption and analysis;
• forgotten and unknown memoirs about the writer;
• critical essays from the periodical press of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century;
• attributions of anonymous and pseudonymous articles in the journals Vremya (1861-1863) and Epokha (1864-1865), as well as in the weekly Grazhdanin  (1873–1874).

Peer Review Process

1. Online research journal Neizvestnyi Dostoevskii=The Unknown Dostoevsky conducts a peer review of all articles submitted to the editorial office that correspond to the subject of the journal, with the objective of their expert assessment. All peer reviewers are acknowledged experts in the field with publications on the given subject in the preceding three years. Critical reviews are kept in the editorial office for five years.

2. All submitted manuscripts are subject to free mandatory double-blind peer review, which is an internationally accepted practice. It implies that reviewers and the author remain anonymous to each other.

3. Peer review is free of charge for the author.

4. Manuscripts are submitted via e-mail to poetica@post.comor vnz01@yandex.ru, yarysheva@yandex.ru.

5. Research articles are examined and inspected for text authenticity using Anti Plagiat software. Articles that do not comply with the requirements will be rejected.

6. Initially, the editor-in-chief makes sure that a submitted article that passed the plagiarism test complies with the journal’s scope of research and format requirements, and assigns two peer reviewers. In case of non-compliance of the article with the journal profile, the author will receive a substantiated response about the rejection of the article by the journal within a week via e-mail.

7. Both members of the editorial board of the journal and external reviewers may be among the reviewers. Within 1-3 months, the reviewer presents an evaluation of the feasibility of article publication. If the reviewers’ opinions do not coincide, the editor-in-chief and the editorial board appeal to the opinion of the third reviewer in order to make an independent decision regarding the publication.

8. After the article is received by the editorial team, peer review may take between 1 and 3 months.

9. Recommendations for reviewers.

• Peer review should be written in the framework of academic discourse;
• The comments contained in the peer review should be respectful (preferably in the form of recommendations);
• Peer review should not be emotional, or refer to the author’s personality or their professional skills.

While analyzing the article, a peer reviewer assesses the following:

• originality of the title and its compliance with the content of the article;
• compliance of the abstract and key words with the content of the article;
• presence of new ideas, concepts, uncommon interpretations, unknown facts in the article;
• analysis of basic scientific literature on the research topic in the list of cited works;
• presence of the publications of the last five years among the cited references;
• accuracy, explicitness and substantiation of the content and conclusions of the article.

10. If necessary, the reviewer makes comments, recommendations and suggestions on improving the text.

11. In their evaluation, the reviewers present one of three opinions:

• to publish the article without any amendments;
• to publish the article after a follow-up revision;
• to reject the article.

12. The text of the review should be presented in print, signed by the reviewer and notarized at work. Alternatively, a digital (scanned) copy of the review may be sent via e-mail from the reviewer’s personal or corporate email address. In this case, a notarized signature is not required.

13. The evaluation is sent to the author (without indicating the reviewer’s name or their place of work) via email or fax. Within a limited time determined by the editor-in-chief individually in each case (but no less than 5 business days or over one month) the author should go over the reviewer’s remarks, and return the article to the reviewer who will evaluate it again and make a decision on whether to recommend it for publication.

14. The editorial board makes a final decision based on the opinion of two reviewers. As soon as the decision to publish is made by the editorial board, the deputy editor-in-chief informs the author about the decision specifying the anticipated date of article publication on the journal website.

15. If an article is not recommended for publication by both reviewers, it will not be accepted for the second review.

16. The editorial office will send copies of peer reviews or a substantiated rejection to the authors via email or fax. The copies of the reviews may be also provided to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation upon request.

17. The articles recommended for publication are published in the forthcoming issues of the journal within 2 to 4 months.

Publication Frequency

В 2014 году вышел один сдвоенный номер. С 2015 года журнал издается ежеквартально - 1 раз в три месяца.

На сайте журнала ежегодно публикуется график выхода номеров в текущем году. Выходят специальные выпуски, посвященные юбилейным датам ученых.

Open Access Policy

The journal is open access. All content is available free of charge to users. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print full texts of the journal articles via a link without prior permission from the publisher and the author - for informational, scientific, educational or cultural purposes, subject to mandatory indication of the source (Articles 1273, 1274, 1286, Part IV of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation).

The journal's website https://unknown-dostoevsky.ru/ contains information about the publication (its history, subject matter, requirements for manuscripts, reviewing, ethics), information about the editor-in-chief, members of the editorial board and the editorial staff (indicating the academic degree, academic title, position, contact information), an archive of journal issues.

Ethics

The authors, editorial board, reviewers and founding publisher of Neizvestnyi Dostoevski=The Unknown Dostoevsky journal (hereinafter referred to as Journal) must adhere to the publication ethics while preparing materials.

Publication ethics refers to a set of rules that forms the basis of the relations among the editorial staff, with members of the editorial board, reviewers and with authors regarding the publication of scientific articles in the journal. All these persons assume the following obligations and strictly observe them in their activities. All controversial issues regarding compliance with these obligations are handled by the journal’s editor-in-chief of the journal.

The editorial office of the journal monitors the implementation of ethical requirements, relying on guidelines prepared by foreign specialized organizations, associations and publishing houses, as well as the Association of Scientific Editors and Publishers. The editors of the journal mainly rely on the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Great Britain; Elsevier Publishing House (Netherlands): Publishing Ethics Resource Kit for editors and Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement, as well as the Declaration on Ethical Principles for Scientific Publications adopted by the Association of Science Editors and Publishers (ANRI).

1. Duties of the Editor-in-Chief

 The editor-in-chief of the Journal is responsible for selecting the articles for publication. This decision should be based on the validation of the work in question and its scientific significance.

2. Duties of Editors

The editorial staff and the editorial board are obliged:

• to communicate with the authors encouragingly and amiably;
• to avoid any preferences to authors according to their race, gender, religious views, citizenship, political preferences or other circumstances that are unrelated to the reliability of the submitted materials and scientific value of the article;
• to provide participation of unbiased competent reviewers, to substitute them when necessary;
• to not accept articles in respect to which they may have a conflict of interest (a conflict of interestis a situation where someone in a position of trust has competing professional or personal interests);
• to ensure the involvement of objective and competent reviewers, replace them if the need arises;
• to not submit information on received manuscripts to any persons except the authors and reviewers;
• to not allow publication of articles in regard to which there is sufficient evidence of plagiarism, articles without scientific value or are inconsistent with the specialization of the Journal and its editorial policy;
• to be responsible for the content of the articles published in the journal (reliability and scientific value of the article must be the chief criteria for publication);
• to not publish the final version of the article without coordination with its authors;
• to take adequate measures in case of ethical complaints concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper (see section 6. The regulation of violations of Publication Ethics).

3. Duties of Reviewers

The reviewers are obliged:

• to treat the reviewed manuscript as a confidential document, not to submit it to other persons without authorization from the editors;
• not to provide public comments regarding their participation of manuscript reviews;
• to give objective and tenable evaluation of the research results without bias in respect their personal opinion of the author, or their age, gender or religious views;
• not to use the unpublished data from the submitted manuscripts for personal use;
• not to review the manuscript or the author in a way that is emotional or inappropriate for scientific discourse;
• to inform the Editorial Board about the lack of time to complete the review, their insufficient competence for the objective evaluation of the manuscript and about the circumstances that prevent such evaluation;
• to inform the editorial board if a conflict of interest arises prior to starting to working with an article;
• to identify relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors. Any statement that is a notice, conclusion, or an argument published before should be accompanied by the relevant citation;
• draw the editor’s attention to any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper that is in their scientific competence. This similarity or overlap will constitute a sufficient reason to reject the manuscript.

4. Duties of Authors

The authors are responsible for the originality and truthfulness of research results.

The authors are obliged:

• to include as co-authors all persons who sufficiently contributed to the research, and to exclude those who did not make such a contribution;
• to ensure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication;
• to ensure that the paper submitted is entirely original;
• if using works or statements by other authors, the author must provide appropriate bibliographic citations;
• to invoke scientific predecessors, whose research results are significant in the development of the subject of the article;
• to avoid offending scientists whose concepts are the subject of controversy in the article (polemical statements addressed to other authors should be respectful and proper, criticism must be well-reasoned);
• to monitor the correctness of the citations presented in the article;
• be responsible for the accuracy of the facts, quotes, proper names, geographical names and other information;
• to guarantee that the article is being submitted for publication for the first time and was not previously published or submitted to another journal.
• to properly cite one’s previous works and avoid self-plagiarism (self-citation) in the paper and artificial increase of the article size;
• to correspond with reviewers properly through the editors and respond to comments and remarks if they arise;
• to indicate the source of financing of the researches presented in the article;
• to inform the editorial board upon discovery of mistakes or misspellings in the article submitted for publication and correct the mistakes as soon as possible.

An article sent to the editorial board should not contain plagiarism. The term “plagiarism” is defined as positioning someone else’s work as your own one, rephrasing significant parts of someone else’s research without reference to the author’s name as well as appropriation of survey results. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

By agreeing to publication, the author enters into a licensing agreement.

5. Responsibility of the Journal’s Founding Publisher

• The publisher not only supports scientific communication and invests in this process, but is also responsible for adhering to all current recommendations in the published work;
• The publisher has no influence on the editorial policy of the journal;
• The publisher provides legal support to the editorial office of the journal, if necessary;
• The publisher ensures the timely release of the next issues of the journal;
• The publisher prints edits, clarifications, and withdraws articles in which violations of scientific ethics or critical errors have been identified.

6. Regulation of violations of Publication Ethics

The editors and editorial board make every effort to prevent breaches of publication ethics. They reserve the right to reject the publication of articles in case of their violation.

The editorial board informs the author (or an unfair reviewer) with a warning letter of non-compliance with the above listed ethical standards, revealing the facts of ethics violation and warning of possible consequences. The author (or an unfair reviewer) is given the opportunity to answer any charges.

Minor violations are handled without third-party involvement.

Major violations may require the official publication of the revealed facts of violations on the journal's website; notification of the employer of the accused. The editor-in-chief and the editorial board should make a decision on whether to inform the employer by examining the available data and through consultations with a limited number of experts.