The Vienna Taiwan Studies Series is an internationally peer-reviewed annual journal (ISSN 2414-1658 ), initiated and edited by the Vienna Center for Taiwan Studies. It covers Taiwan-related topics with a focus on contemporary Taiwan, including social developments, politics, economy and literature/media/film issues.
All articles published in the journal have been subjected to a double-blind peer review. This peer-review process is an independent quality-control procedure for articles submitted to journals and is vital for enhancing the quality, credibility and acceptability of published research papers.
The Series editor Dr. Astrid Lipinsky and the editorial board of the The Vienna Taiwan Studies Series are responsible for maintaining high editorial standards. The editor decides if a submitted manuscript is suitable for inclusion and falls within the journal’s remit. If a submitted manuscript is peripheral to the area of interest covered by the The Vienna Taiwan Studies Series , it will either be rejected or the editor will ask the author to resubmit the paper after it has been revised. If the editors decide that an article is suitable for publication, it will then enter the review process.
The evaluation of each contribution submitted is done through a double-blind peer review. The book editor(s) usually select two independent reviewers (sometimes three) who conduct research or work in the same area as the author and are subject specialists. In the double-blind process all information on the manuscript which identifies the author is removed before the manuscript is sent to the reviewers. The reviewers then judge the manuscript in accordance with a set of standardised criteria and return it to the editor. The editor subsequently pass any comments made by the reviewers back to the author in an appropriate and anonymous format. Neither the author nor the reviewers know each other’s identities, thus ensuring impartiality.
The criteria that editors and reviewers of the Vienna Taiwan Studies Series use for evaluation purposes correspond to international standards, i.e., measures that are commonly used as benchmarks for academic journals. They are as follows:
a) The scholarly importance of the work.
b) Whether the work is of a sufficiently high academic standard that publishing should be supported, including
1. the quality of the argument and
2. the way the results are presented
3. does the work linguistically correspond to the standard of the discipline?
4. do the methods correspond with the state of the art? Methods applied suitable?
5. structure of the presentation is clear, reasonable and balanced
c) Whether the manuscript needs editing or rewriting; should it be shortened (any comments that may be of help to the author).
d) Whether the manuscript is ready for print, or, if not, what remains
to be done?
e) The importance of having this work published for an international audience.
Once a manuscript has been reviewed, it is then placed in one of three categories: rejected, accepted, or returned for revision with the suggestion that the author makes amendments to the article which might meet the reviewers’ satisfaction. If the reviewers ask for a manuscript to be revised, the author has the opportunity to amend the text and resubmit the revised manuscript together with a revision report stating the ways in which s/he has addressed the issues raised by the reviewers. The book editor then decides if the alterations the author has made have sufficiently taken the points raised in the review into account. When evaluating this revision the editors may consult the reviewers. Accordingly, the manuscript will be finally accepted or rejected. If an author is unhappy with any stage of the review process, s/he is free to withdraw the manuscript and submit it to a different journal, subject to prior notice.