Review and Publication Process

REVIEW PROCESS

The review process is an integral part of the publishing process of the scholarly submissions at RMS. RMS follows a double-blind review process.

SUBMISSION OF PAPER

This journal uses a double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.  

To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity.  To help with this preparation please ensure the following when submitting to RMS

  • Submit the Title Page containing the Authors' details and Blinded Manuscript with no author details as 2nd separate files via OJS. An E-mail is then forwarded to the corresponding author and assigns an ID as an acknowledgment.

The Editorial Committee tracks every article received to review it. The Editorial Board comprises an internal committee that primarily works on examining

  1. The Aim and Scope of the manuscript.
  2. Structure, Quality, Originality, and formatting of the manuscript.
  3. Our anti-plagiarism program (Turnitin) scans all articles at submission and during the review process, and the report generated is fully evaluated by the Editorial Team. If the amount of plagiarized text is greater than 20%, the authors are notified and urged to make changes to their manuscript. According to the standards of the RMS (Reviews of Management Sciences) and COPE, if serious plagiarism is detected in the manuscript content or part thereof, the paper is immediately rejected (Committee on Publication Ethics).
  4. After the successful desk review, each paper will be sent to the two independent reviewers.

Double BLIND REVIEW PROCESS

All papers submitted to RMS undergo various steps of the rigorous double-blind review process. It’s a review process in which manuscripts is been sent to the external reviewer as an anonymous identity of the authors to ensure independent review and avoid any potential conflict of interests.

Revision

 In cases where only minor or major revisions are recommended, the associate editor will request that the author revise the paper before referring to the section editor. In cases of conflicting review reports, or where there are one or more recommendations for rejection, the section editor will be requested for their judgment before a decision about revisions is communicated to authors.

Revised versions of manuscripts may or may not be sent to reviewers, depending on whether the reviewer requested to see the revised version. By default, reviewers who request major revisions or recommend rejection will be sent the revised manuscript. All reviewers can access the most recent version of the manuscript via OJS.

A maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript is normally provided. If more rounds are required according to the reviewers, the associate/section editor requests a decision from the chief editor.

EDITOR DECISION

Acceptance decisions on manuscripts can be taken by the chief editor after peer-review once a minimum of two review reports have been received. Acceptance decisions are taken by the Editor-in-Chief or a suitable Editorial Board member. When making a decision, we expect that the academic editor checks the following:

  1. The suitability of selected reviewers;
  2. Adequacy of reviewer comments and author response;
  3. Overall scientific quality of the paper.

The chief editor can select from the following options: Accept in current form, accept with minor revisions, reject and decline resubmission, reject but encourage resubmission, ask the author for revision, or ask for an additional reviewer.

Reviewers make recommendations, and the Editors-in-Chief or section editors are free to disagree with their views. If they do so, they should justify their decision for the benefit of the authors and reviewers.

PUBLICATIONS Timeline

RMS is published two times a year in June (Latest Volume, Issue.1) and December (Latest Volume, Issue.2). We publish the first issue on June 30th and the second issue on December 31st. However, we follow the online First publication policy to give the authors the advantage of early citations. online First allows final articles (completed and approved articles awaiting assignment to a future issue) to be published online prior to their inclusion in a journal issue, which significantly reduces the lead time between submission and publication.

PUBLICATION FEE

RMS does not have an article submission fee. However, the publication fee is PKR 30,000 (Locals) or $200 (International). There are no charges for additional pages and colored images.