Special issues are collections of papers sharing e.g., a common research subject or location where the research was carried out.
The Special Issue proposal form should be sent to the Managing Editor, at the latest, six months before the deadline date set for paper submission indicated in the proposal. To avoid paper rejections without review due to their scope being outside that of the journal, we highly recommend sending the abstracts of all the papers meant to be included in a special issue along with the properly completed proposal form. Please note that conference proceedings-type paper collections are not considered.
The page charge for papers appearing in special issues, to be paid by institutions proposing such issues, is 20 euros per page.
In our view, a special issue does not differ from a regular issue apart from the fact that it is a collection of papers sharing e.g., a common research subject or location where the research was carried out. As such, the same standards regarding paper content (in agreement with the journal's scope) and quality (both scientific and technical) as well as reviewing policies apply.
All papers to be submitted to a special issue should be formatted according to our recommendations listed in the Manuscript Preparation section.
To avoid confusion, papers meant to be published in a special issue should be submitted directly to the Managing Editor - not to our subject editors. Submission instructions will be sent to the special issue coordinator when the Publishing Board decides to consider the issue for publication in the journal.
Each paper submitted to a special issue will be stringently evaluated and, if found inadequate, will be rejected. Therefore, papers submitted to the same special issue should not be interlinked (i.e., rely heavily on each other) to avoid rewriting papers if one or more of them containing essential information the others rely upon (cite extensively) is rejected. We recommend results of e.g., the same experiment (or subject entity) to be presented in one paper rather than divided into parts presented in separate papers that are meant to appear in the same special issue.
To avoid delays in publishing special issues, papers submitted to such issues are evaluated only once and one revision round is allowed. If the reviewers suggest rejection or very extensive (major) revisions, such papers are usually rejected after the first evaluation round.
Papers submitted to a special issue after the submission deadline indicated in the proposal form may not be included in the theme issue but can be considered for publication in a regular issue of the journal.