Publication Ethics

This guide guarantees the quality of the publications of the Revue d'Histoire Contemporaine de l'Afrique—hereafter referred to as the journal. Any person involved in writing or evaluating an article or sitting in the journal's editorial team, is required to comply with it.

The Journal’s Commitments
Peer Review
Best Practices for Autorship
References

The Journal’s Commitments

Frame of Reference

The journal follows the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics regarding ethical practices in scientific publication, relating to the management and commitments of the journal and the authors’ commitments. The journal is also guided by the principles put forward by the research institutions and communities involved in the research it publishes (such as the San Code of Research Ethics).

Journal’s Management

The journal operates on a collegiate basis. It is run by an editorial team. All the members of the team are responsible for ensuring the scientific quality of the journal, according to their area of expertise. More specifically, the members of the Editorial Board, the Editorial Committee, the section editors (Interviews, Critical Reviews, Sources, Fields & Contexts and Miscellanea) and the editors of special issues are responsible for organising the scientific and editorial support for articles submitted to the journal—whether in the context of a section or a special issue—by calling on other members of the board or outside contributors.

Information and Data Protection

The Editorial Team ensures that the information on the journal’s website is reliable, particularly the affiliations of the members of the editorial team: Section Editors, the Editorial Team and the Editor-in-Chief.

The journal ensures the traceability of exchanges with its various partners: authors, reviewers, funding bodies, anyone working with the journal (e.g. proofreading, translation, layout, etc.) via a digital archiving system, and this in a confidential manner. The personal data (e.g. contact details, emails, etc.) of people who deal with the journal will not be used for any purpose other than the editorial process.

Conflicts of Interest

Members of the Editorial Team and external reviewers must recuse themselves if they have a conflict of interest with one of the authors, or with the content of the manuscript to be reviewed.

The journal informs its readers of its own sources of funding via its website. It does not publish advertisements.

Consideration of Alerts

An article containing a valid criticism of an article previously published in the journal may be proposed for publication. The committee will give the authors the right to respond to this criticism.

The journal seeks to identify and prevent behaviour that is contrary to good research practice and to this Code of Ethics. It takes seriously any warnings of possible misconduct by authors, members of the editorial team, its publishers, or persons called upon for double-blind evaluations (e.g. conflict of interest, data fraud, failure to respect ethics or intellectual probity, failure to respect intellectual property, etc.).

Anyone can contact the journal's editorial board (redactionchefrhca@gmail.com) to report unethical practices to the journal. The person making the alert must provide evidence to justify it. The alert will be taken seriously by the editorial board and dealt with to conclusion, regardless of the date of publication of the article concerned. In the event of a breach of ethics, the journal will consider several solutions (e.g. interview with the author, modification or retraction of the article, publication of an explanatory note, etc.). The documents relating to the handling of these alerts will be archived by the Editorial Board.

Peer Review

Intellectual Probity and Peer Review

Articles are selected on the basis of their intrinsic interest and quality, and not on the basis of any benefits they might bring to the members of the committee. The editorial team ensures that the journal remains independent of its host, the Bibliothèque de l'Université de Genève. Articles are selected with a view to impartiality and with particular attention to contributions that contribute to scientific debate. Selection is to be carefully carried out to avoid being influenced by discriminatory practices of any kind.

To ensure that authors are properly supported, each article submitted is subject to an initial pre-evaluation by a member of the journal's editorial team, using the journal's evaluation form. Articles that deviate from the journal's editorial line may be rejected.

Except for articles in the ‘Sources, Field & Contexts,’ ‘Interviews,’ and ‘Critical Reviews’ sections, which are evaluated by an ad hoc section editor (and discussed with members of the Editorial team), articles submitted to the journal are then evaluated using the double-blind peer review method. The anonymity of authors and reviewers is ensured by a member of the editorial board—section editor, special issue editor or member of the editorial board. Thus, reviewers are not informed of the name(s) of the author(s), and vice versa. People asked to evaluate articles are selected for their intellectual and scientific expertise. Two or three people will be asked to review each article. In the event of doubt or differences of opinion between reviewers, additional opinions may be requested by the Editorial Board. Reviewers give their opinion on the appropriateness of publication, as well as their observations, based on the journal's evaluation form. Reviewers are responsible for reviewing articles solely on their content, must point out other publications that are similar (particularly if they are not cited) and must be alert to any discriminatory bias, whether on the part of the authors or the reviewers themselves. In particular, they are invited to remain aware of the often discriminating and homogenising practices with regards to language mastery, and of the multiplicity of linguistic norms and customs in the French-speaking world.

On the basis of the evaluation reports, the editorial team will take one of the following three decisions within a reasonable timeframe (less than 6 months): Accepted, as submitted to the journal; Accepted, subject to modifications (major or minor); Refusal. Once the peer-review process has begun, an evaluation report justifying the decision, whatever it may be, will be sent to the corresponding author by a member of the editorial team. In the event of an article being accepted, subject to modifications, the committee will take a final decision, positive or negative, depending on whether the author(s) have considered the suggestions and comments sent to them. All accepted texts are then edited in cooperation with the author(s). The final version of an article is sanctioned by the signature of a publication agreement.

Best Practices for Autorship

Process and Autorship

Authors should carefully read the instructions available on the journal’s website before starting the submission process. Articles should be sent to the section or special issue editors—whose email addresses are available on the journal website—and to the journal Email address: revuerhca@gmail.com

The corresponding author must ensure that the appropriate people are included in the list of authors, and that all co-authors, having seen and approved the final version of their text, have agreed to submit this article for publication.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors must declare any potential conflict of interest—professional, legal, financial—in particularl any past, present or expected relationship with an organisation that might appear to influence what is in the text—whether or not its content is discussed with that organisation. All non-public research funding used to produce the research must be explicitly mentioned.

For work funded by a public body or an academic society, the specific requirements of that funding agency must be respected and mentioned.

Data and Reproducibility

Authors undertake to submit an original contribution to the journal. It must not have been published previously, nor submitted simultaneously to another journal, including in another language. The argument must rely on original historical sources. These—written, oral, material, etc.—must be referenced and verifiable. They may be requested by the editorial team or the reviewers.

Ethics

In the case of research funded by a public body or an academic society, the specific requirements of this funding agency must be mentioned and complied with. In the event of the research being approved by an ethics committee, this committee must be named in the document.

Anyone submitting an article undertakes to pay particular attention to the protection of vulnerable people, and to ethical and legal requirements, whether in the text or images published in the article.

In the ‘Interview’ section, the interviewee must sign a document authorising the author to transcribe the interviewee’s testimony, to use it in the scientific article in question, and to allow its distribution and reproduction. When applicable, the author will respect the anonymity of the interviewee.

Authors undertake not to go beyond the rules of scientific debate in their articles, nor to make defamatory statements that could be construed as an attack on the reputation of a third party. The opinions expressed in each article are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Intellectual Property

When submitting their article, authors undertake to authorise its distribution in digital format, via the journal’s website and its indexing in databases. Articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. If authors wish to enter into additional and separate contractual arrangements for subsequent publication (i.e., a book or translation in another journal), they are encouraged to contact the RHCA and acknowledge its initial publication.

The authors will have taken the necessary steps to obtain the physical and dematerialized reproduction and representation rights for iconographic and/or multimedia sources to be reproduced in their article. Alternatively, they will have taken care to collect royalty-free material—in the public domain or under Creative Commons licences.

Authors must guarantee the originality of their article and must not publish any text that in any way resembles plagiarism or counterfeiting. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements are contrary to the ethics of scientific publication. Therefore, they are unacceptable. Anti-plagiarism or anti-artificial intelligence software may be used by the journal, in case of doubt expressed during the evaluation.

Authors undertake to make a clear distinction in their work between what is their own and what they have borrowed from others, and any quotation—or use of other people’s work must be identified as such and accompanied by the appropriate references, presented in accordance with the journal’s guidelines.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor being currently peer reviewed by another scientific journal. In exchange, the journal undertakes to respect reasonable deadlines for peer-review, i.e., less than six months.

Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections

Any author who discovers, after publication, a significant error or inaccuracy in their own work must inform the journal’s editorial team without delay, and cooperate with the Board to publish an erratum, or even to withdraw the article and replace it with an explanation of the problem.