Peer Review Process
The Voices of English Language Education Society (VELES) journal is committed to maintaining the highest academic integrity and quality standards through a rigorous and transparent peer review process. This process ensures that published research meets the highest scholarly and ethical standards while making a meaningful contribution to the field of English language education.
1. Submission
Authors must submit their manuscripts through the journal's online submission system, ensuring that they adhere to the journal’s formatting and ethical guidelines. Before undergoing editorial review, all manuscripts are subjected to plagiarism detection software to ensure originality and integrity.
2. Initial Evaluation
The editorial team conducts an initial evaluation to determine whether the manuscript falls within the journal's scope, meets basic quality standards, including originality, clarity, and research relevance, and complies with ethical guidelines, such as authorship policies and AI disclosure requirements. Manuscripts that fail to meet these criteria are desk rejected without external review, and authors are notified with reasons for rejection.
3. Peer Review
If the manuscript passes the initial screening, the editor assigns it to two or more independent reviewers who are experts in the relevant field. Reviewers are selected based on their expertise, reputation, and experience in reviewing academic manuscripts. VELES follows a double-blind peer review system, ensuring that both authors and reviewers remain anonymous throughout the process to promote fairness, objectivity, and unbiased evaluation.
Reviewers evaluate the manuscript based on criteria such as originality and contribution to English language education, research methodology and validity of findings, clarity and coherence of presentation, significance, and impact of the study, and adherence to ethical guidelines, including authorship transparency, AI disclosure, and research integrity. Based on their evaluation, reviewers provide detailed comments and a recommendation, choosing from the following options: accept without revisions, minor revisions, major revisions, or reject.
4. Revision Process
If revisions are requested, authors must carefully address all reviewer comments and submit a revised manuscript incorporating the requested changes along with a detailed response letter explaining how each comment was addressed. For major revisions, the revised manuscript is typically returned to the original reviewers for a second evaluation. This process may be repeated until the reviewers and the editorial team are satisfied with the revisions.
5. Final Decision
After the peer review process, the Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision based on the reviewers’ recommendations. The possible outcomes include acceptance, conditional acceptance pending final minor revisions, or rejection. The editor informs the authors of the final decision and shares the reviewers' comments. If accepted, the manuscript moves to the production stage.
6. Production and Publication
Accepted manuscripts undergo proofreading and typesetting to prepare them for publication. Authors may be asked to review the proofs to ensure accuracy before final publication. Once finalized, the manuscript is published online and included in the next available journal issue.
7. Continuous Improvement of the Peer Review Process
VELES is dedicated to enhancing its peer review process by collecting feedback from authors, reviewers, and editors, adapting to international best practices and ethical standards, and ensuring the highest level of scholarly quality and integrity. By following this rigorous and transparent peer review process, VELES ensures that all published research upholds the highest academic and ethical standards, contributing to the advancement of English language education scholarship.
