- Privacy policy
The general policies of ALAJ are as follows:
- Submitted articles must focus on the science and technology of using natural materials, chemicals, or energy derived from predominantly lignocellulosic sources, such as wood, agricultural residues, paper, and their byproducts.
- Examples of subjects that are within the scope of the journal include, but are not limited to, advances in fiber and other natural product uses for papermaking, production of fuels from agricultural residues and woody biomass, natural and synthetic composites involving lignocellulosic biomaterials, modifications of such biomaterials to improve their performance in different applications, replacement of petroleum-based materials with such biomaterials, production of biofuels from such biomaterials, synthetic chemicals derived from lignocellulosic sources, and bio-based textiles in new applications such as medicine.
- Articles to be included in the journal must describe significant advances or significantly improved explanations and of subjects within the scope of the journal. In addition to originality, the work must be understandable to a general audience of post secondary-educated people having backgrounds such as chemistry, chemical engineering, biomaterials, and materials science. However, we encourage all authors to provide fundamental explanations of non-basic concepts to respect the diverse backgrounds of people who may not be conversant in the field.
- English will be used as the standard language of articles in ALAJ. Prospective authors are urged to consistently adhere to a standard form of English, following U.S. English, British, or Australian conventions. All scientific measurements should also conform to SI standards, e.g ., meters, kilograms, and liters. There will be no set standard method of describing measurement suffixes outside of the SI frame, e.g ., volume may be expressed in liters, deciliters, cm 3 , cc, etc ., whatever unit is consistent with the English of the user.
- Prospective authors are required to faithfully follow the format provided in the appropriate article template selected from those provided in the Author Instructions section. In essence, the authors format their articles such that they are essentially ready to upload, with the exception of page numbers.
- Authors are asked, as far as they are able, to make clear differentiations in their writing between (a) facts learned from sources that they identify (followed by a citation), (b) facts that are presumed to be common knowledge (usually expressed in the present tense and requiring no citation), (c) observations made by the authors as part of the described work (usually express in the past tense), and (d) hypotheses and conjectures (often preceded by words such as “it is proposed that,” or “possibly.”
- Submission of articles advancing unconventional hypotheses or frameworks of thought is expressedly welcome, though this is not a guarantee of acceptance for publication. The fact that experimental evidence or theoretical work remains incomplete, inconclusive, or conflicted will not necessarily count against the publication of a submitted article. On the other hand, it is required in such cases that there be significant new evidence or new thinking that helps to support the unconventional views advanced in the article. Articles submitted as rebuttals will be treated independently by the editors, not necessarily on the basis of a presumed “equal time” criterion.
- Commercialism will not be permitted in items submitted to ALAJ. For instance, brand names of materials used in an investigation are to appear only once in an article, in the section titled “Experimental.” The research materials or equipment must be described in chemical and physical terms. Work that merely shows one product working better than another product will not be considered for publication.
- Authors have the responsibility to make sure that artwork, figures, and the like reproduced from other sources are either free of copyright issues or that the authors have obtained specific, written permission to re-use these items in the submitted work.
- Authors retain rights to their material, which, upon acceptance by the journal, is uploaded and made public on the Internet. The journal retains no copyright. Readers have a right to produce copies of abstracts (html format) and whole articles (PDF files) and to use these unmodified items with proper attribution, and in the spirit of fair use.
- By submitting an article to ALAJ, an author grants the journal the right to publish the contents as a PDF file on the Internet, dependent on the results of the review process and subsequent judgment of an editor. The right to publish the article is an exclusive right held by ALAJ until the article is either rejected or published and the article cannot be submitted to another journal during our review process. In cases where the journal declines to publish and so informs the author(s), this right of publication is ceded back to the author(s).
- The peer-review process for research articles and scholarly reviews is carried out in an automated fashion. Each article is sent to be judged by three reviewers working independently, without knowledge of each others’ identity. The reviewers are selected by the co-editors or by their subject-editor designees.
- The editors reserve the right to make a final judgement on whether or not to approve an article for inclusion in ALAJ. This decision will be made based on their judgements relative to the weight of input from the reviewers, the degree to which the article falls within the scope of the journal (see earlier), the degree to which the article is expected to interest substantial numbers of readers, the uniqueness of the work, the overall quality of the work, the effectiveness of the writing in engaging the interest of potential readers, and other factors listed elsewhere in this list.
- Authors are responsible for making sure that the contents of submitted articles have not previously been published. An article will be considered as having been previously published if more than 1000 copies have been produced (for instance, as part of a very large conference), if the material has been posted on the Internet, or if the article has been offered for sale to the public either alone or as part of a journal, book, or website item. Academic theses, which can be published or placed on the web, will not be counted as publications. Conference articles will not be counted as being already published, as long as the numbers of copies falls below the level described earlier in this paragraph. Authors must disclose in their Acknowledgements section any previous publication of contents of their work in conference preprints, etc., and also state whether the copyright owner has granted them permission to republish the material. Presentations and abstracts shorter than 1500 words will not be considered to be prior publications.
- Authors have the responsibility to not copy the work of others. This responsibility extends to having made a good-faith effort to cite important previous work that the authors have used in the process of carrying out your work and in describing the results of that work. Evidence of verbatim copying (except for short quotes with proper attribution and quotation marks), or paraphrasing the work of others without proper attribution, will be sufficient grounds for rejection of an article. Reviewers, in the peer-review process, are asked to report to the editors any obvious evidence of plagiarism that comes to their attention. The editors reserve the right to reject or delete articles for which irrefutable evidence of unauthorized copying becomes known to them.
- There is no subscription fee for ALAJ. Rather, in order to promote a high accessibility and impact, the main website of Alaj is made available, free of charge, to all Internet users.
- The main website of ALAJ, including the pages that are mostly likely to be accessed by potential readers, will be kept free of commercial content. This restriction is intended to help maintain a dignified spirit of scientific and scholarly inquiry within the journal. The restriction, however, will not apply to the pages of the website used for submission of articles and reviewing of articles since the process of publication of the journal must be subsidized to ensure its open access character.
- ALAJ will be organized as a bi-monthly journal, using volume numbers and issue numbers, i.e., we will have twelve issues per volume per year.
Author’s certification: By the act of submitted an article to ALAJ , the author(s) are certifying that the following statements all are true:
The article and its contents are original. The material was written by the author(s), and it has not been published elsewhere, except in the case of (a) a thesis by one of the authors, (b) an abstract having less than 1500 words, or (c) material accompanying a conference presentation, with the stipulation that the copyright owner has given permission for publication in ALAJ and a statement describing the initial publication (even if just figures) and permission statement appears in an Acknowledgements section of the submitted article.
2. No other journal is currently considering the submitted article for publication.
3. Nothing in the article violates the personal or property rights of other individuals, including plagiarism or libel.
4. Permission has been obtained for use of any previously copyrighted material that appears in the article, and such permissions are disclosed in an Acknowledgements section of the submitted article.
5. All new findings and conclusions in the submission have been generated as a result of controlled experimental or modeling designs and have been reached with acceptable levels of precision and/or accuracy commensurate with what is expected in a professional journal.