About the Journal
Focus and Scope
The Revista da Faculdade de Direito da UERJ is a tool to publicize juridical scientific studies and has as a main objective the dissemination of researches directed to this type of public. The submission of scientific articles to this Journal is open to anyone interested, from any educational or research institutions and from any professionals of the area, both lecturers and students.
THE MISSION
The mission of this Journal is to encourage and disseminate academic law studies in Brazil, contributing to create a plural and democratic academic sphere of excellence in the country.
THE HISTORY
The Journal is a biannual, permanent and bilingual publication, bound to UERJ’s Post Graduation Program in Law, one of the most traditional in Brazil. In 2010, the journal has been through a wide process of reformulation, which changed its editorial policies in order to follow the patterns of scientific excellence established by the State’s agencies and the academic community bases of indexation. In this context, the Journal was totally upgraded and digitalized, being transferred to an online database of UERJ’s publication portal in the SEER system, and starting to publish biannually.
The Journal publishes articles from professors, researchers and post graduation students of educational institutions from all over the country. All the studies are evaluated by the double blind review system, in order to guarantee the quality of the editions. UERJ’s Law School has a publication sector which gives support to the chief editors of the journals, helping in the editorial process, call of articles, text editions and graphical designs of the journals.
Peer Review Process
RFD's ethical standards are in accordance with guidelines provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE is a forum of journal editors that discusses aspects of ethics in the field of electronic journals. Listed below are the ethical standards followed by the Journal's editorial team for publications.
CODE OF CONDUCT FOR EDITORIAL JOURNALS
Editors must be responsible for everything that is published in their journals. They must:
- Seek to meet the needs of authors and readers;
- Constantly improve the quality of journals
- Ensure the quality of the published material
- Prioritize freedom of expression
- Maintain the integrity of the scholarly record;
- Prevent business needs from compromising intellectual standards;
- Always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when necessary.
- Establish with integrity and respect for ethics the relations with readers and authors;
- Decide on the acceptance or rejection of an article based on the importance, originality, clarity of the work, and on the study of its relevance to the purpose of the publication;
- Provide regularly updated guidelines on what is expected from authors and referees, which are related to the ethical standards;
- Ensure that the identity of referees is protected;
- Ensure that material submitted to journals remains confidential while under review and edit;
- Respond promptly to complaints and ensure that complaints can be logged;
- Encourage debate by allowing criticism of criticized papers unless there are firm reasons not to publish such criticism and allowing the authors of the criticized papers room to respond;
- Ensure that published articles conform to internationally accepted ethical guidelines, encouraging academic integrity
- Protect individual data;
- Take action if misconduct is suspected, whether in published or unpublished materials;
- Maintain systems to manage its conflicts of interest, as well as those of its staff, authors, referees and Editorial Board members;
- Respect privacy;
- Protect intellectual property and copyrights;
- Ensure editorial independence.
Managing editors should work with journal editors to:
- Set policies that are appropriately intended to respect, in particular, editorial independence; research ethics, including confidentiality, consent, and special requirements for research; authorship; transparency and integrity (e.g., conflicts of interest, research funding, standard reporting); peer review and the role of the editorial team; appeals and complaints
- Communicate the journal's policies (e.g., to authors, readers, reviewers);
- Periodically evaluate the journal's policies, especially with respect to new COPE recommendations;
- Assist parties (such as institutions, funders, governing bodies) responsible for investigating suspected research and publication misconduct and, where possible, facilitate in the resolution of such cases;
- Publish content in a timely manner
- Rules details available at:http://publicationethics.org/files/u2/New_Code.pdf
Publication Frequency
The Journal (RFD) is online and has a one volume per year. (rolling pass)
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.
Indexers
Latindex: http://www.latindex.unam.mx/buscador/ficRev.html?folio=21530&opcion=1
Diretório do Sistema Eletrônico de Editoração de Revistas - SEER/Ibict: http://seer.ibict.br/
Diadorim - Ibict: http://diadorim.ibict.br/handle/1/347
Evaluation Policy
The analysis and evaluation of articles submitted to Revista da Faculdade de Direito da UERJ is carried out through a peer review policy.
The first step of the evaluation process occurs when the editor receives the article submitted to the journal and checks the submitted file to confirm the absence of authorship identification, which is essential to ensure an impartial and safe evaluation. At the same time, the submitted file is checked for compliance with other standards required by the journal, such as respect for page limits.
The next step is to send the article to two different evaluators, and two criteria are used to select these evaluators: i) the evaluator's area of interest; ii) the number of articles being evaluated by the evaluator, so as not to overload any evaluator.
After this selection, the editor designates the reviewers and selects the evaluation form to be filled out by them (sent as an attachment along with this journal's evaluation request). The editor then sends an e-mail to the referees, informing them of the choice, checking their availability, and requesting their opinion.
The evaluator may accept or not the invitation. If not accepted, the editor receives an e-mail with the news and selects another evaluator; if accepted, the evaluator must perform the analysis and evaluation within twenty days, and this period may be extended for another ten days. At the end of the mission, the evaluator must return with the form attached and fill out the opinion in the system, which offers five options to the evaluators: accept; accept, provided mandatory corrections are made; reject; submit again; submit to another journal.
As the evaluators register their opinions in the journal's system, the editor must register it, so that the evaluation can be seen by the author. At the end of this process, made by the two evaluators, the editor must make the recommended decision, following the necessary steps for the publication or not of the article.
If the paper is accepted without changes, the editor will communicate the decision to the author and forward the paper to the editing queue. If the reviewers recommend acceptance only with the necessary corrections, the editor will communicate the decision to the author and wait for the return with the necessary changes, and then approve the paper and move it to the editing queue. If, however, it is recommended that the article be resubmitted, the process will be restarted, with the selection of a new reviewer.
Also, if the article is rejected and/or there is a recommendation to submit it to another journal, the editor must communicate the decision via e-mail to the author, forwarding the result of the evaluation attached, for the author's knowledge and possible contribution to the work, based on the recommendations made by the referees. In such cases, the article will be archived.
It is worth pointing out that, in two evaluations, the recommendations of both evaluators are considered in the decision, taking into account, however, the more severe evaluation, that is: if there is a recommendation that the article be rejected, its submission may not be carried forward for eventual approval.
At the end of the evaluation process, the referees who worked on the analysis of the article are notified of the receipt of their opinion, and thanked for their valuable contribution to the smooth running of the journal.
RFD publishes articles by guest authors as a way of stimulating and honoring researchers from the Uerj School of Law and also from other teaching and research institutions. The quality of the article and/or the importance of the event in which it was presented are the criteria for the invitation. On the other hand, we also try to meet the manifestations of interest of our faculty members and internal researchers who wish to have their articles published in our journal. With this objective in mind, in order not to violate the percentage of exogeny, we accept a maximum of two articles per issue from authors linked to the Uerj School of Law.
We do not yet have sections for reviews and translations of articles published in foreign journals.
Sponsors
Journal History
RFD was created in 1993 and published in print version until 2006. In 2010 the journal returned to digital circulation, following the creation by UERJ, of the UERJ Publications Portal to support the various journals created by the institution in this period.
