· General info
· Peer Review
· Research Data Policy
· Open Access Policy
· Copyright and Licensing
· Disclaimer
Aims and scope
Building Materials and Structures aims at providing a platform for international communication and dissemination of innovative research in the field of building materials and structures. Journal publishes articles on the characterization of building materials, their technologies and modeling. In the area of structural engineering Journal publishes papers dealing with new developments in application of structural mechanics for the analysis and design of structures, as well as on the development and skillful use of novel building materials and technologies.
The scope encompasses the following areas in building materials and structures: conventional and non-conventional building materials, recycled materials, smart materials such as nanomaterials and bio-inspired materials, infrastructure – earthquake – wind – fire – blast engineering, structural reliability and integrity, life cycle assessment, structural optimization, structural health monitoring, experimental methods, digital design methods, data-driven analysis methods, performance-based design, innovative construction technologies, value engineering etc.
Building Materials and Structures publishes original papers that have not been published previously. The following types of articles are published: Original scientific articles, Review articles, Preliminary reports, Technical articles, Projects Notes, and Discussions. Conference Reports on major international and national conferences of particular interest to Building Materials and Structures. Book Reviews on new books relevant to the scope of Building Materials and Structures.
Building materials and Structures is an Open Access journal.
Contributions to the journal shall be submitted in English language.
Building materials and Structures is issued four times a year. Journal is indexed in SCIndeks, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index), WoS.
In accordance with law, digital copies of all published volumes are archived in the legal deposit library of the National Library of Serbia in the Repository of SCIndeks – The Serbian Citation Index as the primary full text database.
The submitted manuscripts are subject to a peer review process. The purpose of peer review is to assist the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communication with the author, it may also assist the author in improving the manuscript.
This journal uses a single blind review process, which means that the authors do not know the names of the reviewers, but the reviewers know who the authors are. The reviewers act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities. The reviewers are selected solely according to whether they have the relevant expertise for evaluating a manuscript. They must not be from the same institution as the author(s) of the manuscript, nor be their co-authors in the recent past.
Review process
In the review process, the Editor-in-Chief first assesses whether the contents of the manuscript comply with the scope of the journal. If this is the case, the paper is sent to at least two independent experts in the field, with the aim of assessing its scientific quality and making recommendation regarding publication. If the manuscript needs to be revised, the authors are provided with the reviewers’ remarks. The authors are obliged to correct the manuscript in accordance with the remarks, submit the revised manuscript and a special file with the answers to the reviewers within the given deadline. The final decision, whether the paper will be published in journal or not, is made by the Editor-in-Chief.
During the review process, the Editor-in-Chief may require authors to provide additional information (including raw data) if they are necessary for the evaluation of the scholarly merit of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.
Under normal circumstances, the review process takes up to four weeks, and only exceptionally up to three months. The total period from the submission of a manuscript until its publication takes an average of 90 days.
Resolving inconsistences
In the case that the authors have serious and reasonable objections to the reviews, the Editorial Board makes an assessment of whether a review is objective and whether it meets academic standards. If there is a doubt about the objectivity or quality of review, the Editor-in-Chief will assign additional reviewer(s).
Additional reviewers may also be assigned when reviewers’ decisions (accept or reject) are contrary to each other or otherwise substantially incompatible.
The final decision on the acceptance of the manuscript for publication rests solely with the Editor-in-Chief. Only in case where the Editor-in-Chief is an author of a submitted manuscript, the decision is made by the Editorial Board.
Building Materials and Structures encourages authors to share research data that are required for confirming the results published in the manuscript and enhance the published manuscript under the principle ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. We accept supporting software applications, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound or video clips, large appendices, data tables and other relevant items that cannot be included in the article.
Authors may submit data together with the manuscript through our journal management system. In this case, the data will be published once the manuscript is accepted for publication online. Note that these materials will not be copy-edited or typeset: their appearance and format is entirely the author’s responsibility. The deposited data must have been labeled in such a way that a 3rd party can make sense of it (e.g., sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file).
A ‘Data Accessibility Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data accessibility. If the data is restricted in any way, the reasoning should be given.
Alternatively, authors may deposit relevant data in a FAIR-compliant repository – institutional, disciplinary, or general-purpose. If you need assistance in finding a FAIR compliant repository, check this link: https://repositoryfinder.datacite.org/. Authors should also provide via the repository any information needed to replicate, validate, and/or reuse the results / your study and analysis of the data. This includes details of any software, instruments and other tools used to process the results. Where possible, the tools and instruments themselves should also be provided.
Exceptions: We recognize that openly sharing data may not always be feasible. Exceptions to open access to research data underlying publications include the following: obligation to protect results, confidentiality obligations, security obligations, the obligation to protect personal data and other legitimate constraints. Where open access is not provided to the data needed to validate the conclusions of a publication that reports original results, authors should provide the relevant access needed to validate the conclusions to the extent their legitimate interests or constraints are safeguarded.
Journal Building Materials and Structures is published under an Open Access license. All its content is available free of charge. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search the full text of articles, as well as to establish HTML links to them, without having to seek the consent of the author or publisher.
The right to use content without consent does not release the users from the obligation to give the credit to the journal and its content in a manner described under Licensing.
SELF-ARCHIVING POLICY
Authors are permitted to author’s post-print (accepted version) / publisher’s version (PDF) of their work in an institutional repository, subject-based repository, author’s personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), and/or departmental website at any time after the acceptance of the manuscript.
Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and links must be made to the article’s DOI and the license.
ARTICLE PROCESSING CHARGE
Journal Building Materials and Structures does not charge authors or any third party for publication. Both manuscript submission and processing services, and article publishing services are free of charge. There are no hidden costs whatsoever.
Copyright
Authors retain copyright of the published papers and grant to the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media.
Licensing
The published articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA). It is allowed to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided, it is indicated if changes were made and the new work is distributed under the same license as the original.
Users are required to provide full bibliographic description of the original publication (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages), as well as its DOI code. In electronic publishing, users are also required to link the content with both the original article published in Building Materials and Structures and the license used.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the Editors and Editorial Staff. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in the articles. The publisher shall have no liability in the event of issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.