About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Journal of Agriculture and Environment for International Development (JAEID) is an international, multidisciplinary journal publishing original research and technical papers concerning activities devoted to International Development in the Global South, particularly associated with marginalized and resource-limited contexts.

The topics covered by the journal comprehend, but are not limited to:

Agronomy, crop production and food security studies in rural and urbanised marginal contexts
Sustainable management of natural resources in agriculture (e.g. soil, land, water)
Remote sensing applications, forestry and natural resources evaluation
Rural development, inclusive of economic analysis, and social sciences studies concerning farmand environmental management
Livestock production, aquaculture and fisheries and conservation of animal biodiversity
Climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation strategies related to previous topics

We encourage the submission of original and innovative results from international cooperation projects. The journal specifically does not address papers referring to human health studies and/or about experimental studies without a direct link to rural development.

Editorial and Peer Review Process

The practice of peer review is to ensure that only good science is published. It is an objective process at the heart of good scholarly publishing and is carried out by all reputable scientific journals. Our referees play a vital role in maintaining the high standards of JAEID and all manuscripts are peer reviewed following the procedure outlined below.

Journal Editors evaluate all manuscripts after the submission. Manuscripts rejected at this stage are the ones which are insufficiently original, have serious scientific flaws, have poor English, or are outside the aims and scope of the journal. A plagiarism check is also performed. The papers that meet the minimum criteria are normally passed on to at least 2 experts for review.

JAEID employs double blind reviewing, where both the referees and the author remain anonymous throughout the process.Referees are matched to the paper according to their expertise and our database is constantly being updated.

How long does the review process take? The time required for the review process is dependent on the response of the referees. Should a referee’s report be unnecessarily delayed, a new expert opinion will be sought. In very rare cases for which it is extremely difficult to find a second referee to review the manuscript, or when the one referee’s report has thoroughly convinced the Editors, decisions at this stage to accept, reject or ask the author for a revision are made based on only one referee’s report. The Editors’ decision will be sent to the author with recommendations made by the referees, which usually includes verbatim comments by the referees. Revised manuscripts might be returned to the initial referees who may then request another revision of a manuscript. According to the current experience, the average duration of the review process of JAEID is about 6 months.

A final decision to accept or reject the manuscript will be sent to the author along with any recommendations made by the referees and may include verbatim comments by the referees.

Open Access Policy

JAEID provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, Firenze University Press at the University of Florence, complies with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access: By “open access”, we mean the free availability on the public internet, the permission for all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain is to guarantee the original authors with control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. We support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in our journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0). Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their websites prior to and during the submission process and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication without embargo. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

Publication Frequency

Manuscripts are accepted at any time through the online submission system. The publication is semiannual.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with JAEID agree to the following terms:

Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in JAEID.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Publication Fees

Unlike many open-access journals, JAEID does not charge any publication fee.

Waiver Information

Fee waivers do not apply at Firenze University Press because our funding does not rely on author charges.

Publication Ethics

Responsibilities of JAEID's editors, reviewers, and authors concerning publication ethics and publication malpractice are described in JAEID’s Guidelines on Publication Ethics.

Corrections and Retractions

In accordance with the generally accepted standards of scholarly publishing, JAEID does not alter articles after publication: "Articles that have been published should remain extant, exact and unaltered to the maximum extent possible".
In cases of serious errors or (suspected) misconduct JAEID publishes corrections and retractions (expressions of concern).

Corrections
In cases of serious errors that affect or significantly impair the reader’s understanding or evaluation of the article, JAEID publishes a correction note that is linked to the published article. The published article will be left unchanged.

Retractions

In accordance with the "Retraction Guidelines" by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) JAEID will retract a published article if:

there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation)
the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication)
it turns out to be an act of plagiarism
it reports unethical research.

An article is retracted by publishing a retraction notice that is linked to or replaces the retracted article. JAEID will make any effort to clearly identify a retracted article as such.
If an investigation is underway that might result in the retraction of an article JAEID may choose to alert readers by publishing an expression of concern.

Archiving

JAEID and Firenze University Press are experimenting a National legal deposition and long-term digital preservation service.