Editorial policies
How Synthica Journal reviews manuscripts, licenses what it publishes, holds authors and editors to account, and keeps the record permanent.
Peer review
Every manuscript passes through five editorial stages before acceptance. Review is conducted by the journal's category editors — each stage is handled by editors of the manuscript's own subject section — and authors follow their manuscript's progress live from the Synthica dashboard.
-
Stage 1
Dual first review
Two Reviews Editors from the manuscript's section read the submission independently. Both readers must recommend the manuscript for it to advance — a single-reader pass is not enough. This double-reader consensus is deliberate: it keeps early decisions from resting on one person's judgement.
-
Stage 2
Senior screening
A Senior Editor screens the manuscript for scope, rigor, and fit with the journal before detailed editorial work begins.
-
Stage 3
Associate editing and revisions
An Associate Editor works directly with the authors through up to two revision rounds. Each round, the editor sends consolidated comments; the authors revise and resubmit from their dashboard workspace.
-
Stage 4
Senior final check
The Senior Editor verifies that revisions resolve the editorial concerns and that the manuscript meets the journal's standards.
-
Stage 5
Editor-in-Chief sign-off
The Editor-in-Chief makes the final acceptance decision on every manuscript.
-
Publication
DOI and issue
After acceptance, the journal's Director registers the article's DOI and publishes it into the open quarterly issue. Publication follows acceptance directly — articles do not wait for an issue date.
A manuscript may be declined at any stage; authors are notified with the editors' reasons. Editors recuse themselves from manuscripts where they have a personal, supervisory, or institutional conflict of interest. Authors may appeal a decision once, in writing, to journal@synthica.org; appeals are considered by the Editor-in-Chief, whose decision is final.
Open access & licensing
Synthica Journal is a fully open-access journal. Every article is free to read from the moment it is published — no subscriptions, no embargoes, no reader charges. The journal also charges authors nothing: there are no submission fees and no article-processing charges.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright in their work and grant the journal the right of first publication. Under CC BY 4.0, anyone may share, reuse, and build on a published article — including commercially — provided the original authors and source are credited and the DOI is cited.
Because authors keep their rights, they may deposit any version of their article in repositories, on preprint servers, or on personal and institutional sites, without asking the journal's permission.
Publication ethics
The journal publishes work by researchers at the start of their careers, which makes honest practice more important, not less. These expectations apply to every submission.
- Originality. Submissions must be the authors' own unpublished work and must not be under consideration elsewhere. Text, data, figures, and ideas taken from other sources — including the authors' own earlier work — must be clearly attributed. Editors screen for plagiarism at review.
- Authorship. Everyone listed as an author must have contributed substantially to the work and approved the submitted manuscript; nobody who meets that bar may be left off. Honorary, gift, and ghost authorship are all misconduct. Author order is agreed among the authors before submission.
- Data honesty. Fabricating or falsifying data, selectively omitting results, or manipulating images beyond whole-image adjustments is misconduct. Authors must retain their underlying data and, where possible, state in the manuscript where it can be found (see the manuscript guidelines on data availability).
- AI use. Generative AI tools cannot be authors. Any substantive use of such tools must be disclosed in the manuscript, and authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy and originality of all content. Details are in the manuscript guidelines.
- Misconduct handling. Concerns about a submission or a published article can be raised confidentially at journal@synthica.org. The editors investigate, giving the authors the chance to respond. Outcomes range from correction to retraction; retracted articles remain online, clearly marked as retracted, with their DOI intact, so the record stays traceable.
Archiving & identifiers
DOIs. Every article receives a Digital Object Identifier at publication, registered under the journal's prefix 10.55555 (for example, 10.55555/synthica.2025.0001) and resolvable at doi.org. Article metadata — title, authors, abstract, license, and references — is deposited with the DOI registration, and article pages carry full bibliographic metadata, including Google Scholar citation tags.
ISSN. An ISSN application for the journal is in progress. Until it is assigned, the masthead shows “ISSN pending”; the number will appear there and on all issue pages once issued. Publisher, frequency, and numbering are maintained to the serial standard throughout.
Volumes and issues. The journal is published quarterly by Synthica. Volumes are annual — Volume 1 covers 2025 — and each volume contains four quarterly issues. Accepted articles are published into the volume's open issue as soon as they are ready, and pages are numbered continuously within each volume, so citations are stable from the day an article appears.
Permanence. Published articles are not removed. The journal is a statically archived, openly hosted publication: every article page and PDF remains available at its DOI-resolved address, and the site's full publication history is retained under version control. Corrections and retractions are appended to the record rather than replacing it.