Guidelines and Procedures for Peer Reviewing Articles

1. Every article submitted to the editorial board of the Journal is reviewed by the editorial staff for its compliance with the thematic concept of the Journal and with guidelines concerning technical formulation of the article. If these guidelines are not observed, the author shall be notified within two weeks that the article cannot be accepted for review without the relevant amendments. The editorial board reserves the right to reject an article that is inconsistent with the general profile of the Journal. If all the guidelines have been observed, the article is forwarded to the peer reviewer.
2. Peer reviewers are appointed from the members of the Journal editorial board, or the task is assigned to outside experts. All peer reviewers must be acknowledged specialists on the subjects of the materials to be reviewed, and have published works on the theme of the article being reviewed within the past 3 years. Texts of peer reviews remain on file at the editorial office of the Journal for a period of 5 years since date of publication of papers. 
3. If the reviewer considers that he is not a specialist in the field of the article, or is unable to submit a timely review, he is obligated to inform the editor of the circumstance and distance himself from the procedure of reviewing the article.
4. The editorial board of the Journal sends to authors of submitted articles copies of reviews, or a motivated rejection, and undertakes to send copies of reviews to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation by a relevant request. 
5. The senior editor of the Journal sets the deadline for the submission of a peer review. That deadline must not exceed 2 months. The length of the review must be no less than one page of printed text.
6. The reviewer must submit the review by the stipulated deadline and comply with the following requirements:
   -contain an estimation of the originality of the material, judgement of its degree of importance, novity, timeliness, extent to which the subject matter has been researched, sufficiency of disclosure on the theme, the logic and grounds for conclusions;
   -contain a motivated listing of the deficiencies of the article;
   -contain conclusions regarding publication of the article or its publication after allowance for remarks, or rejection of the article.
7. The author has the right to challenge the remarks of the reviewer and send to the reviewer a written response stating the grounds on which the remarks were not taken into account.
8. In debatable cases, the editorial board of the Journal may decide to send the article for an additional peer review by a specialist on the subject of the article.
9. Upon receipt of the peer reviewer’s response, a collective discussion of the article shall be conducted at a meeting of the editorial board. On the basis of this discussion, a final decision will be made regarding the publication or rejection of the article by the Journal. Grounds for rejection may be a substantial inadequacy of the research conducted, or substantial deficiencies in the text of the article. The author may receive an offer to make further work on the article. In such an eventuality he may submit a new version of article that shall also be subject to peer review. If the author fails to observe the reviewer’s remarks in this second version to a satisfactory degree, the article shall be rejected.The author is notified about the decision of the editorial board by the executive secretary of the Journal.
10. The article accepted for publication is submitted to the editor. Editorial correction of the text is agreed with the author.