Journal Information & Policies
Section Policies
Study Protocols
 Open Submissions |
Indexed |
Peer Reviewed |
Peer Review Process
The review process for Social Science Protocols differentiates between two types of proposals.
Study protocols that have received funding from a major funding body and ethical approval are in principle accepted for publication pending an internal reviewing process by the Managing Editor, Deputy Editor and a member of the Editorial Board. Proof of ethics and funding will be required and authors are asked to provide these documents on submission.
Study protocols without funding or ethical approval will be assessed through a double-blind peer reviewing process. Study proposals will conduct a quality appraisal based on basic core set of criteria:
1) The clarity of the research questions and why the authors consider the goal of the research to be important (including adequate reference to literature and underpining theories).
2) The appropriateness and clear descriptions of the research methodology and data analysis for addressing the research goal (including power calculations and sample size).
3) The appropriateness of the proposed recruitment strategy and rational of the sampling to provide access to the type of knowledge sought by the study.
4) The justification and clear description of the data collection setting and strategy to address the research issue (including systematic record keeping).
5) The rigorousness of proposed data analysis (including clarity of description of systematic data analysis and reliability of the proposed procedure).
6) The consideration of ethical issues, including provision of sufficient details to participants, discussion of issues raised by the study (e.g., informed consent or confidentiality) and approval of the proposed study from an ethics committee.
7) The consideration of confounding facors and researcher bias, and use of quality appraisal tools (such as NICE guidelines, TAPUPAS system or CASP tool) to ensure the validity of the analysed data to reliability answer the research questions.
In order to acknowledge differing ideological and theoretical assumptions, the reviewers withhold the right to broaden the scope of the evaluative quality criteria depending on the research traditions relevant to the social science discipline of the reviewed manuscript. After the peer-reviewing process, manuscripts will be 'accepted', or commended for 'revision and resubmission' or 'rejection'.
Study protocols of randomised controlled trials are required to follow the CONSORT guidelines and provide the trial registry and the unique identifying number at the last section of the abstract.
Publication Frequency
'Social Science Protocols' is an online journal platform that publishes accepted study protocols throughout the year.
Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
This journal’s open access policy is in line with UK research funders’ policies.
Authors are not charged any APCs (Article Processing Charges) or other publication fees.
Copyright Notice
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
More information on Creative Commons here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en_GB
b. 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 acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c. 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).
d. Authors are required to make sure submitted content does not infringe third-party copyright. Authors must obtain permission to reproduce any third-party material for online – and print, if applicable – publication in perpetuity. It is also the authors’ responsibility to include any acknowledgements requested by copyright holders, and to mark clearly third-party material used with permission, material that has separate licensing terms, and material used under exceptions or limitations to copyright.
More information is available from the UK's Intellectual Property Office and Creative Commons.
Permissions
It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse articles published in this journal, provided that reuse is in line with the article’s Creative Commons licence and attribution to the author(s) and the published article is maintained. Please note that these terms do not extend to any material that has separate licensing terms specified or any material that is identified as being the copyright of a third party. Permission to reproduce third-party material must be obtained directly from the copyright holders concerned.
Archiving
This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...
Take Down Policy
What Edinburgh University Library will do if you believe content on this hosting platform infringes any person's rights, or applicable UK laws.
Journals on the Library’s platform are strongly encouraged to make every effort to ensure that published content does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws.
Should you discover content in this journal that you believe to be illegal, or infringes any of your statutory rights, you may contact the Library who will review the complaint.
On receipt of your complaint, the Scholarly Communications Team will:
- Make an initial assessment of its validity
- Acknowledge receipt of the complaint by email
- For all but spurious complaints, cease access to the item that is subject to complaint
- Refer the complaint to the University's Legal Advisor for comment and advice
- Seek to verify your identity and authority as complainant.
When the Service Manager has verified the authenticity of your complaint and has been advised that it is ostensibly legitimate, the article will be removed from public access, leaving behind the article abstract.
If the Legal Advisor confirms that it does not breach any law then the item will be reinstated.
Please contact:
Scholarly Communications Team, Edinburgh University Library
Floor F East, Argyle House
3 Lady Lawson Street
Edinburgh
EH3 9DR
Email: edinburgh.diamond@ed.ac.uk
Please note the Library is staffed 9-5pm Monday-Friday
Privacy and Consent Policy
The data collected from registered and non-registered users of this journal falls within the scope of the standard functioning of peer-reviewed journals. It includes information that makes communication possible for the editorial process; it is used to inform readers about the authorship and editing of content; it enables collecting aggregated data on readership behaviours, as well as tracking geopolitical and social elements of scholarly communication.
This journal’s editorial team uses this data to guide its work in publishing and improving this journal. Data that will assist in developing this journal platform (Open Journal Systems – OJS) may be shared with its developer Public Knowledge Project (PKP) in an anonymized and aggregated form, with appropriate exceptions such as article metrics. The data will not be sold by this journal or PKP nor will it be used for purposes other than those stated here.
Registered users
Users who register with this journal, including authors and peer reviewers where applicable, consent to having the personal information being stored in the University’s journal hosting platform (OJS) and processed by the platform and journal editorial teams.
Authors
Authors who make a submission to this journal consent to the personal information they supply as part of the submission being stored in the University’s journal hosting platform (OJS) and processed by the platform and journal editorial teams. Authors who make a submission have the responsibility to ensure that all contributors have read this Privacy and Consent policy and consent to having their personal information that is supplied as part of the submission process being stored in the University’s journal hosting platform (OJS) and processed by the platform and journal editorial teams. Authors published in this journal are also responsible for the human subject data that figures in the research reported in the journal.
Website visitors
The University’s journal hosting platform (OJS) collects anonymised usage log data, including IP addresses, pages visited, date visited, browser information, and geographical data. This information is not used to identify visitors personally and it is not used for any purpose other what is described here. The platform also uses cookies to manage session history and provide a better user experience – more details can be found on the Cookies information page.
Rights of the Individual
Those involved in editing this journal seek to be compliant with industry standards for data privacy, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provision for “data subject rights” that include (a) breach notification; (b) right of access; (c) the right to be forgotten; (d) data portability; and (e) privacy by design. The GDPR also allows for the recognition of “the public interest in the availability of the data,” which has a particular saliency for those involved in maintaining, with the greatest integrity possible, the public record of scholarly publishing.
All users whose details are stored in the University’s OJS installation can exercise their rights of the individual, as they are detailed in the GDPR.
If you have a user account and wish to have it deleted, please email Edinburgh University Library at edinburgh.diamond@ed.ac.uk.
