The European Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (EJELS) is a fully open access peer-reviewed journal devoted to the empirical study of law and legal systems. It aims to bridge the substantive domain of law and the empirical approaches broadly conceived, ranging from quantitative to qualitative methods. The Journal is committed to fostering a methodologically pluralist, intellectually open, and disciplinarily inclusive academic culture. EJELS is not restricted to any particular field of law nor any particular legal system, but particularly welcomes submissions of relevance to a European audience.
Journal Policies
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSING
Authors contributing to EJELS agree to publish their articles under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which gives third parties the right to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. It also gives third parties the right to remix, transform and build upon the material for any purpose, except commercial, on the condition that clear acknowledgment is given to the author(s) of the work, that a link to the license is provided and that it is made clear if changes have been made to the work. This must be done in a reasonable manner, and must not imply that the licensor endorses the use of the work by third parties. The author(s) retain copyright to the work. Learn more >>
AUTHORSHIP CRITERIA
In accordance with the ICMJE’s Vancouver rules, each author (and any co-authors) must meet all of the following criteria and all who meet these criteria must be identified as authors:
- They have substantially contributed to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
- They have participated in drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content;
- They have approved of the submitted version of the manuscript;
- They agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work and authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.
PEER REVIEW POLICY
Reviewers should generally take note of COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, and specifically ensure compliance with following items.
- Authors of manuscripts and reviewers of the same manuscript must not be close colleagues, family members, work on the same research project, or otherwise have a close collaboration.
- Reviewers should only accept to assess manuscripts that fall within their own subject area.
- Reviewers should respond to invitations without delay (normally within one week) and submit completed reviews within a reasonable time (normally within four weeks).
- Reviewers’ comments must not contain hostile or provocative language and must not include personal attacks, slander or other derogatory comments.
- Reviewers are asked to substantiate their recommendation with arguments about the strengths and the weaknesses of the paper.
- Reviewers should not share the work they are reviewing and keep its content confidential.
PREPRINT POLICY
The Journal allows authors to upload previous drafts of their texts to appropriate publishing services, provided that the author accepts the following conditions:
- The authors retain all rights to any pre-published version, and has permission to submit their text to the Journal.
- The author accepts that the Journal cannot guarantee full anonymity in the review process, even if the submitted files have been anonymised (see review policy) as previous versions are available.
If the text is published in the Journal, the author is expected to cross-link (with DOI link) the two versions of the work.
ORCID
The Journal's editors strongly recommend that authors submitting manuscripts register an “Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier ”or ORCiD. If you don’t have an account yet, you can create one here https://orcid.org.
This registration provides a unique and stable digital author identity that ensures that the article is attributed to the correct person and improves the searchability of all the author's publications. This helps to ensure that the author receives recognition for their work. As a person's ORCiD remains the same as long as the account exists, any name changes, change of employment, department affiliation or research field do not affect the searchability of previous publications. This facilitates correspondence between research colleagues.
The Journal's editors encourage all authors to include ORCiD along with other author information when the manuscript is registered in the system. If the article is accepted, this will be published with the article.
OPEN DATA
The Journal adheres to the principles of Open Science and authors are therefore required to make the data related to their work publicly available according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) upon publication. If this is not possible, the authors are required to explain why it is either not necessary or not possible to make material (both data and code) publicly available, for example for privacy reasons.
The material thus made available must be linked to within the submitted manuscript under a special heading. Research data should then be made public when the article is published. Empirical material obtained from other researchers must be referenced in the same way as other scientific sources. For further questions about guidelines for handling open data and guidelines about how data should be handled and published, please contact your university.
ETHICAL APPROVAL
The Journal adheres to the highest standards of research ethics. Therefore, all works submitted to this journal and involving human subjects are expected to be approved by the relevant ethics review committee. If for any reason it was not possible to obtain an ethics approval, please explain this at the stage of submission.
PRE-REGISTRATION
We strongly encourage authors to submit their pre-registration links, especially for hypothesis-testing studies. For the value and importance of pre-registration, we refer you to the Center for Open Science. However, you are free to use other reliable repositories to pre-register your study.
CORRECTION AND RETRACTION POLICIES
The conditions of publication with persistent identifiers such as DOIs include that the object published is final and not changed without readers being clearly informed of such changes.
Articles published in the Journal cannot therefore be changed without a) an erratum or b) a change notice being published and linked to the original article.
If a factual error in an article is discovered, this should be reported to the Editor-in-Chief, who decides on possible actions and possible corrections.
COMPLAINTS AND APPEALS POLICY
In the case of formal complaints, disputes, or appeals, authors should contact the Editor-in-Chief, who is responsible for ensuring that a fair, deliberative, and thorough investigation is conducted.
ARCHIVING POLICY
The Journal's current and future content, beginning when the Journal joins Publicera, is made available via Publicera and stored long-term on a secure and central server at the National Library of Sweden.
In the event that the Journal ceases operations, the Journal's content on Publicera will remain archived at the National Library of Sweden.
POLICY FOR ETHICAL OVERSIGHT
The Journal follows the ethical guidelines and best practices set forth by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). All cases of ethical misconduct will be dealt with in accordance with COPE's recommendations and guidelines.
PUBLICATION FEES
There are no fees for publishing in the Journal.
