Editorial Policy

EJIMEL welcomes a wide range of unpublished scholarly submissions such as articles, commentaries, reports on contemporary developments, book reviews, judgments as well as notes on recent legislation, case law and guidelines on future changes from the targeted law orders. The journal accepts contributions from recognized authorities and younger experts in law as well as related disciplines and legal practitioners in four languages (English, German, French and Italian).

EJIMEL follows the Open Access standard in order to grant access to academic knowledge in the area of Islamic and Middle Eastern law to a broad international audience. Accordingly, all texts published are freely available online and for download. Authors do not pay any publication fees. A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) will be awarded to each contribution. This provides a system for persistent and actionable identification and interoperable exchange of managed information on digital networks. In addition, the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

EJIMEL claims only the right to publish and archive the texts in its institutional repository, without the exclusive right to use them. Elementary copyrights therefore remain with the authors. However, the republishing or translation of a contribution that originally appeared in EJIMEL needs the mention of the first publication in EJIMEL in the published text. The rights of use follow the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

We welcome contributions on a rolling basis and publish articles on our website as soon as they are accepted and cleared for publication. Hence the length of time from submission through publication can be reduced considerably. Furthermore, contributions may also be solicited by the editors. A comprehensive volume drawing from the published manuscripts will be posted online or published in print annually. The pagination of the annual volume will follow the pagination of the individual contributions which will for their part be numbered according to their chronological order.

EJIMEL strives to ensure a high academic standard of quality through peer review. The decision to subject a contribution – both solicited and unsolicited – to peer review lies with the Editor-in-Chief. EJIMEL refereeing is a double-blind process where authors and reviewers remain unaware of each other’s names. The reviewers will be selected individually for each submission. Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, the editors decide whether the contribution can be accepted as it is or should be revised or rejected. Revised papers have to be resubmitted to the editors who will make the final decision on publication. In any case, all final decisions concerning the acceptance and publication of a contribution are at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief. Contributions that do not meet EJIMEL’s scholarly standard may be rejected altogether without stating further reasons.

Apart from the anonymous peer review process, the journal’s editors are not constrained by any particular methodological or theoretical framework. The primary criteria in our review and selection process are namely the quality of work, language and significance for the contemporary academic recourse.