About the Journal
1. Open Access Policy
Sports Law, Policy & Diplomacy Journal (SLPD Journal) is an open access journal. Users may read, download, copy, redistribute, print, search, and link to the material, modify, transform, or build upon it, or use it for any other lawful purpose, as long as they acknowledge the source appropriately in accordance with the CC BY-NC licence until vol. 3, no. 1 (2025) and CC BY 4.0 licence from vol. 3, no. 2 (2025).
The Diamond Open Access model is used, i.e., no author processing fees and no fees for access to published articles apply, and authors retain copyright
2. Self-archiving Policy
The papers published in the SLPD Journal may be deposited and self-archived in institutional and thematic repositories and self-archived if a link to the journal and HRČAK websites is provided.
The journal does not charge article processing charges (APC). The self-archiving policy is indexed at Sherpa/RoMEO, where it can be seen that the journal follows the green level of self-archiving (it is allowed to deposit pre-print, post-print and the publisher's version of the paper).
3. Peer Review Process
3.1. Peer Review Policy:
All manuscripts undergo an initial editorial check in order to assess whether the manuscript meets the journal's scientific and editorial standards and whether it fits the journal's goals and themes.
Those manuscripts that pass this initial review will be subjected to a double-blind review in which neither the author's nor the reviewer's identity will be disclosed. Therefore, authors are asked to remove from the text and bibliography, as well as from the properties of the electronic document, any information that might reveal their identity (name, project information, acknowledgements).
The Editorial Board will inform the authors in a timely manner about the results of the reviewers' and editors' work on the text. The Editors reserve the right to change the text according to the suggestions and norms of the English or Croatian language.
All manuscripts submitted in English require prior proofreading and editing by a native speaker or a professional editor to eliminate grammatical and spelling errors, as well as any typographical errors.
Reviewers must inform the Editorial Board of any possible conflicts of interest or irregularities related to the paper being reviewed. All papers received for review must be treated as confidential documents.
Upon receipt of the reviewers' reports, the authors shall submit to the Editorial Board, in addition to the new version of the manuscript, a cover letter indicating which reviewers' suggestions were accepted and in what manner (with reasons).
3.2. Categorisation of papers:
An original scientific paper presents the results of original research that has not previously been published in full or in preliminary form.
A preliminary communication contains at least one new scientific fact or result that requires immediate publication, but it should not contain sufficient detail to test the results described, as is the case with original scientific articles.
A review article contains an overall overview of recent and current research in a particular area. Articles in this category are surveys in nature that should include critical references and evaluations. The references must be complete enough to provide a good insight into the subject matter.
A professional paper does not have to be based on original research, but should contribute to the application of well-known research findings and present theoretical concepts.
A conference paper is a presentation from a scientific conference, previously delivered at such a conference, published in the form of a full paper and peer reviewed.
4. Copyright notice
SLPD Journal is an open access journal. The Journal does not charge article processing charges (APC) to authors. It is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC licence 4.0.) until vol. 3, no. 1 (2025) and from vol. 3, no. 2 (2025) under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY licence 4.0).
Users may read, download, copy, redistribute, print, search and link to, modify, transform or build upon, or use the material for any other lawful purpose, as long as they acknowledge the source appropriately in accordance with the CC BY 4.0 licence.
Papers published in the SLPD Journal may be deposited in institutional and thematic repositories and self-archived if a link to the journal and HRČAK websites is provided.
After acceptance of the manuscript for publication by this Journal, the author can publish the same manuscript in other journals only with the permission of the Editorial Board (second publication). A republication should include a reference to where the manuscript was originally published.
5. Plagiarism Check
All manuscripts received are routinely checked for similarity to existing literature (plagiarism and self-plagiarism) by the iThenticate Similarity Check program:
https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check/.
6. Scientific misconduct, Procedure regarding scientific misconduct & Penalties
6.1. If it affirms that authors, peer-reviewers, publisher or editors or other involved parties have committed any form of scientific or ethical misconduct, the appropriate actions will be taken.
6.2.1. Every person may report the scientific misconduct of any involved persons by e-mail to the Editorial office. The complaint should contain general info on the claimant, point out the person being charged for scientific misconduct and if possible point out the paper which is result of scientific misconduct, brief description of scientific misconduct and, if possible, evidences of misconduct.
6.2.2. Editor will examine all the circumstances of the complaint and collect all the necessary evidences by proper means. The editor shall contact the claimants within three months from receiving the complaint and inform them whether the complaint was justified or not along with the explanations.
6.2.3. In the case of conflict of interests, the editor will retreat from the procedure and ask the publisher to appoint another person to run the procedure.
6.3. If the complaint is justified, depending on the severity of the scientific misconduct, the following actions may be taken
- Informing or educating authors or peer-reviewers on the scientific misconduct with the request to redo their task in compliance with this PEMS.
- Withdrawal unpublished paper from the publishing or discharging and appointing the new peer-reviewer for the individual paper.
- Publishing of appropriate notice, corrigendum, erratum or formal article retraction disclosed in print and electronic versions of the Journal.
7. Ethical principles: Author's responsibilities
7.1. Standards
The text of the paper submitted for publication must conform to accepted methodological and technical standards for writing a scientific paper and Author Guidelines. The data presented in the paper must be accurate.
7.2. Originality, plagiarism and citations
Authors should submit for publication only manuscripts that are their original texts and in which they clearly and precisely cite the work and/or parts of the work of other authors. Authors are required to cite not only parts of other authors' work that are directly cited in the paper, but also work that served as inspiration and stimulus for the paper.
7.3. Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication
Papers dealing with the same research should generally not be published in more than one journal. Submission of the same paper to more than one journal is considered unethical and improper. Authors should not submit a paper for publication if it has already been published elsewhere or is under review in another journal. Only in justified cases and with the express permission of the Editor-in-Chief will publication of a previously published paper be permitted.
7.4. Authorship
Only persons who have made a substantial contribution to the work may be listed as co-authors of the work. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to list as co-authors only those persons who have made a substantial contribution to the writing of the paper and to ensure that the co-authors acknowledge the final version of the paper and agree to its publication.
7.5. Conflict of interest and financing of the research
Authors are required to disclose to the Editorial Board information about potential conflicts of interest of any kind (e.g., employment, writing reports to international and national bodies, providing legal opinions, project proposals, etc.) that may be related to the research results and conclusions presented in the paper at the earliest possible time of submission of the paper for publication. In particular, authors are required to provide information on financial support for the conduct of the research presented in the paper.
7.6. Fundamental errors in published paper
If the authors discover significant errors in their published paper, they are obliged to inform the editorial office immediately so that the paper can be withdrawn or corrected as soon as possible. If the editorial office receives the information from a third party, the author is obliged to immediately prove the accuracy of the data or submit corrections. In this case, the Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to withdraw the contribution from publication if necessary.
8. Policy on Corrections and Denials of Published Article
8.1. Correction of data in the published article
The authors of the article are responsible for the accuracy of the published data in their article. Authors are expected to respond to editorial and reviewer comments in a professional and timely manner. If the author decides to withdraw a manuscript that has already been submitted to the review process or does not want to accept the reviewer's suggestions after the review process has been completed, he/she is obliged to inform the editor-in-chief as soon as possible. All corrections in the paper must be made before publication of the issue, therefore the corresponding author receives the final version of publication shortly before the publication, which must be reviewed and corrected within a short deadline defined by the Editorial office (usually 48 hours). If despite this and after publication the authors find a major error in the published article, they can submit a correction (erratum) to the editors, and it will be published online in the first next edition.
8.2. Withdrawal of published article
If, after the publication of the article, the authors notice an error that affects the reproducibility of the research and the accuracy of the results, then they report that error to the editors who, after a repeated review (and if they understand the author's doubts), will mark the online version of the article with the mark "retracted by the author". The link to the withdrawn paper will still be active, but the mark on the paper will clearly indicate that the paper has been withdrawn from the author's side. If the editors, reviewers or readers after publication notice that the article (or part of the article) has already been published, that the data in the article has been falsified, or that the research was not conducted in accordance with ethical principles, the editorial board will consider the report and if it is determined that the authors have violated ethical principles they will withdraw the paper, and the paper will be marked with "retracted by the editor". The link to the withdrawn paper will still be active, but the mark on the paper will not clearly indicate that the paper has been withdrawn by the editor. Any procedure for withdrawing a published article is done in accordance with the COPE guidelines.
9. Authorship and AI
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, their use is expanding fast even in research publications. SLPD Journal joins Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and other authorities in stating that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper. AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the content of the submitted work, cannot affirm the presence or absence of conflict of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.
Use of AI tools
The SLPD Journal will not accept manuscripts that use AI tools (chatbots) as sources as the content generated by LLMs is not traceable or reproducible.
Acceptable uses of AI tools include proofreading, style check, translation, image improvement to increase quality.
Authors who use AI tools in the process of their research, such as for collection and/or analysis of data or for production of images and graphics, or software codes must transparently disclose in the initial part of the paper which AI tool and how it was used. The use of linguistic tools must be disclosed in the Acknowledgement section. Authors bear full responsibility for the content of their manuscript, including the parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.
Reviewers and AI
Reviewers are responsible for keeping the confidentiality of data through the process of evaluation until the final decision is made. This must be kept in mind if using any LLM tools. Large parts of manuscript containing confidential information must not be copied into LLM-based tools. Reviewers are allowed to use only the tools that can assist in formatting language and style, they must not use AI tools to generate review reports.
The SLPD Journal's supports and follows the Elsevier Generative AI policies for journals.
