Information For Authors

For authors

If you are considering or wish to submit an article for publication in our journal, please read the following information. Before submitting a manuscript, you should:

1) Read the general information under About the Journal.

2) Check whether the manuscript complies with the Submission Preparation Checklist and Author Guidelines.

3) Familiarize yourself with the Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement (PEMS).

4) Submit a Declaration of Authorship and Interests using the following form.

5) To submit a manuscript, please register.

6) If you have already registered, submit your manuscript and start the five-step approval process.

The review process, correspondence with the editors and the subsequent acceptance process should be carried out through the account you created at the time of submission and, if necessary, by email. Note that all submitted articles will be checked using plagiarism detection software.

There are no submission or publishing fees.

Policies on authorship and contributorship

It is important to ensure the authenticity of an article’s author(s) in two senses. First, all contributors to the article should be credited as authors; and second, individuals who are not in fact authors of the article should not be named as authors.

Authors are those who have made a significant contribution to the design, conduct or interpretation of the study. Persons who have made some other significant contribution to the preparation of the article (e.g., editing, designing the figures, etc.) should also be acknowledged in an acknowledgements paragraph.

Authors should carefully consider who to include on the list of authors for a manuscript and in what order and provide the final list of the authors at the time of initial submission.

Authors bear personal or collective responsibility for an article submitted for publication. All authors must provide a completed and signed Declaration of Authorship and Interests before submitting manuscripts.

Policies on conflicts of interest / competing interests

Undisclosed conflicts of interest. A conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), reviewer or editor has a financial or personal relationship that unduly influences (biases) his/her decisions regarding the contents, suitability, timing or other aspect of a publication.

Authors must declare any potential conflicts of interest in writing or certify that they have none when completing the Declaration of Interests. They should declare any financial or personal relationships with other individuals or organisations that could be considered as biased and interested in the publication of the article.

Unpublished material disclosed in a submitted manuscript may not be published without the express written consent of the author.

Policies on data sharing and reproducibility

The author(s) of an article may reuse the material in their article in new works without permission or payment (linking to the article in the journal): they may include the article in a subsequent collection of their work, expand the article to book length, and reuse parts of the article in other works. They may use and share their work for scholarly purposes (linking to the article in a journal), distribute the article, including by email, to students and fellow scholars for personal use, publicly share the online link to the article on any website or repository, etc.

The publishing institution, Vytautas Magnus University, has the right to make copies of the published article available in both electronic and physical form for non-commercial, educational and research, purposes within the University. Articles may be included in applications for submission to databases or grants. Material published in articles may be included in research papers and syllabi (but not in open online courses), and in theses and dissertations used within the University. In all cases, a reference to the journal article must be provided.

Policy on intellectual property

The authors and the journal agree to the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which licenses peer-reviewed journals and grants the journal permission to publish their unpublished and original manuscript. This provision also applies to open access issues of Soter. The journal’s copyright is protected under the “Rules for the Management, Use and Disposal of Intellectual Property of Vytautas Magnus University” as approved by the Council of VMU in 2019. The journal protects its copyright and does not transfer it to any interested group.