ISSN: 2634-1484

This information is divided into the following sections:

• Focus and Scope
• Publication Frequency
• Content Policy
• Peer Review Process
• Open Access Policy
• Preservation and Archiving Policy
• Rights and Permissions
• Takedown Policy
• Privacy and Consent Policy

Focus and Scope

Reflective Professional is an annual, student-based journal in information science and information related disciplines, providing research, theoretical perspectives and accounts of reflective professional practice that are connected to students' academic and practical work. The journal aims to provide Robert Gordon University students with a platform to publish their own work in a fully open access journal. Reflective Professional publishes work by students at both masters and doctoral level, including critical reviews and short opinion articles on issues relating to developments in contemporary information science.

The journal was originally developed over the course of 2019 and 2020, publishing its first issue in June 2021. Subsequent issues will be published on an annual basis.

Publication Frequency

This journal is published once each year, in June.

Content Policy

The editorial board welcomes submissions from Robert Gordon University students from any course, exploring a range of topics in the field of library and information science. Submissions are also welcome from different fields that related to these topics, such as communication, media and digital marketing.

The journal currently publishes a mixture of long and short articles. Long articles may include original dissertations, which are expected to be around 10,000 to 15,000 words. Short articles may include critical reviews, opinion pieces and conference papers, and are expected to be around 3,000 to 5,000 words. The journal also welcomes submissions in other media such as video or audio, as long as these are also accompanied by a textual equivalent for the purposes of accessibility.

The editorial board select dissertations from among those completed each year. They may also recommend students to submit content from other parts of their studies. Students are also welcome to make submissions to the editors for consideration by following the instructions on the journal's "Information for Authors" page. The editors will acknowledge receipt of all submissions. Any submissions that do not correspond with the rationale of the journal or which are clearly insufficiently original, seriously flawed or which are not written in English of sufficient quality may be rejected at this stage. Otherwise, submissions will be subjected to peer review and, once formally accepted, allocated to a future issue of the journal. The editors hold the final decision on acceptance of rejection of any submissions.

Peer Review Process

All submissions that are given provisional approval by the joint editors will be subjected to peer review. The submissions are anonymised and passed on to two or more reviewers from within the editorial board. Reviewers are asked to evaluate each submission in terms of the following criteria:

• Is the submission original?
• Is the submission theoretically and methodologically sound?
• Is the submission rigorous and critically engaged with relevant work?
• Does the submission contribute to the overall purpose of the journal?

Recommendations and comments from reviewers will be returned to the submitting author along with a provisional indication of acceptance or rejection. The editors aim to do this within two months of the initial submission. Authors must deal with any issues identified during peer review before the submission can be formally accepted for publication by the editors.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. All content, unless otherwise indicated, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

Preservation and Archiving Policy

Robert Gordon University’s journal platform is hosted by the University of Edinburgh (UoE) as part of a SCURL Shared Service. The UoE is part of the LOCKSS programme (https://www.lockss.org/), which aims to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries, and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of partner-hosted journal content for the purposes of preservation and restoration.

The files that contain the contents of each journal article are backed up daily by the UoE, as part of the routine backup of the server (virtual machine) that hosts the journal platform. The UoE team who manage the server infrastructure can retrieve backed up data on request from the Robert Gordon University journal hosting team.

Rights and Permissions

This journal requires authors to sign a non-exclusive licence to publish as part of the submission process. This licence grants Robert Gordon University the right to publish the submitted work under the terms of the journal’s Open Access policy (defined above), and also to make translations of the submitted work into other languages and media, for the purposes of accessibility and preservation.

Authors retain copyright and are able to enter into separate, additional contracts for the non-exclusive distribution of the published version of this work – for example, posting it to an institutional repository, or publishing it as part of a book – as long as the original publication in this journal is acknowledged. Authors are permitted and encouraged to share their work online at all stages of the publication process, as this can lead to productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of the published work. Authors are expected to ensure that their submitted work does not contain any infringement of third-party copyright.

Users of the journal are permitted to share and reuse published content, provided that reuse is in-keeping with the licence under which the content has been published. For full details of the activities that are permitted under the licence and any restrictions that apply, please refer to the links in the journal’s Open Access policy (above). These terms do not extend to any material that is indicated as having a separate licence or as being the copyright of a third party. Permission to reproduce and reuse third-party material must be obtained directly from the relevant copyright owners.

Takedown Policy

All journals hosted on Robert Gordon University’s journal platform are strongly encouraged to make every effort to ensure that published content does not infringe any person’s rights, or applicable UK laws. Should you discover content in this journal that you believe to be illegal or to infringe any of your statutory rights, you may contact the Journal Hosting Service, who will review the complaint:

On receipt of your complaint, the Journal Hosting Service will:

1. Make an initial assessment of its validity.
2. Acknowledge receipt of the complaint (by email, where possible).
3. Remove public access to the relevant article, except where the complaint is considered to be spurious.
4. Refer the complaint to the University’s legal advisor for comment.
5. Seek to verify your identity and authority as complainant.

If your complaint is determined to be legitimate and authentic, then public access to the article will be permanently removed, though the abstract will remain publicly visible, along with a note to explain why the full text is no longer available. If the University’s legal advisor determines that the article is not in breach of any law, then public access to the article will be reinstated.

Privacy and Consent Policy

The data collected from registered and non-registered users of this journal falls within the scope of the standard functioning of peer-reviewed journals: it includes information that makes communication possible for the editorial process; it is used to inform readers about the authorship and editing of content; it enables the collection of aggregated data on readership behaviours, as well as tracking geopolitical and social elements of scholarly communication.

Data that will assist in developing this journal platform (Open Journal Systems – OJS) may be shared with its developer, Public Knowledge Project (PKP), in an anonymized and aggregated form. The data will not be sold by this journal or PKP, nor will it be used for purposes other than those stated here.

When an author makes a submission to this journal, they consent to any personal information that is supplied as part of the submission being stored on the University’s journal platform. Additionally, they consent to the same information being processed by the system, by the journal editors and by system administrators. It is the responsibility of the submitting author to ensure that all contributors to the submitted work have read this Privacy and Consent Policy, and consent to the same. Authors whose work is published in this journal are also responsible for any human subject data that features in their work.

When a user registers with this journal, they consent to having their personal information stored in the University’s journal platform. Additionally, they consent to the same information being processed by the system, by the journal editors and by system administrators.

When a user visits the journal website, the University’s journal platform collects anonymised usage data, including IP addresses, pages visited, date visited, browser information and geographical data. This information is not used to personally identify visitors and is not used for any purpose other than those detailed above. The platform also uses cookies to manage session history and to provide a better user experience. Cookies are small text files that a website saves on a user’s device when they visit a site, and which enable the website to remember a user’s actions and preferences for future convenience. Visiting this journal may create the following cookies:

• A cookie titled OJSSID is created when a user first visits a journal page. It is used to store a session ID and to facilitate logins.
• Performance cookies are created to analyse site usage, to help us measure and improve site functionality. Anonymous data about a user’s visit is collected and amalgamated with that of other visitors, so that it is not possible to personally identify a specific user from that information. Users can opt out of providing this information, with no impact on their experience of the journal website.

Users can control and/or delete cookies as you wish. For more information on this, see https://aboutcookies.org/. If a user decides to delete cookies and/or prevent them from being placed by the journal website, they may need to manually adjust some preferences every time they visit the website in future. Additionally, registered users will no longer be able to log into their accounts while cookies are blocked.

This journal seeks to comply with industry standards for data privacy, including the provision within the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) for "data subject rights". These rights include:

• Breach notification – to be informed when an unauthorised entity accesses your personal information.
• Right of access – to view your personal information.
• Right to be forgotten – to have your personal information removed from the platform.
• Data portability – to request a copy of your personal information.
• Privacy by design – to be confident that technological developments on the platform are designed to ensure the continued privacy of your personal information.

The GDPR also recognises that there may be a "public interest in the availability of the data", which is particularly important for scholarly communications, when journal publishers are seeking to maintain public records for the published content with as much accuracy and integrity as possible.

If you have a user account and would like to have it deleted, please email the journal hosting service (journalhosting@rgu.ac.uk).