About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Oñati Socio-Legal Series (ISSN: 2079-5971) is an international peer-reviewed on-line journal which publishes work within the field of law and society. This is broadly defined to include work which makes a significant contribution to the understanding and analysis of law as a set of social institutions, processes, practices or techniques, using any methodologies and approaches from the social sciences and humanities.

The IISL and its journal OSLS take pride in their cosmopolitan and all-inclusive vocation, especially regarding production and dissemination of high-profile academic knowledge. English being today's main vehicle of expression of scientific knowledge, it is also our journal's main language. However, although a title, abstract, and key words in English are mandatory for all papers, OSLS accepts and encourages use of other languages as well - by reason of the IISL's origin and location, Spanish, French and Basque are the other three main ones.

OSLS publishes, among others, monographic issues of articles resulting from or related to workshops, meetings or other scientific activities, as well as individual papers.

Articles should normally be of 8-10,000 words, including title, abstract, and references.

Publication Frequency

The OSLS will publish one volume per year, with issues published bimonthly. Further special issues can be published.

Issues will be published on the first day of February, April, June, August, October, and December.

Ownership disclosure

Oñati Socio-Legal Series is owned and published by the Oñati IISL Foundation, which is a non-profit organisation established jointly in 1988 by the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Law (RCSL) and the Government of the Basque Country, which nowadays provides most of the funding.

To learn more, please read our Statutes: http://www.iisj.net/en/about-iisl/statutes-foundation-international-institute-sociology-law-o%C3%B1ati

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 cross-disciplinary global exchange of knowledge. Its sharing license is CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution, Non-commercial, No derivatives). Read more in our Copyright Notice.

Publication Charges

The IISL is a non-profit organisation, and Oñati Socio-Legal Series does not take any publication charge from the authors.

Oñati Socio-Legal Series operates on a principle of universal APC waiver: it offers a service of Diamond Open Access for which equivalent journals charge an average APC of 2,300 Euros per article (data from May 2020).

Abstracting and Indexing services

Oñati Socio-Legal Series is included in the following Abstracting and Indexing services:

• ESCI (Web of Science Core Collection)
• Scopus
• CrossRef
• Dialnet
• Directory of Open Access Journals – DOAJ
• Google Scholar
• ISOC
• REDIB
• ANVUR, Italy's National Evaluation Agency for University and Research
• Qualis
• CIRC
• Dulcinea
• ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences)
• Latindex 2.0 Catalogue
• MIAR
• Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions (UHR)
• Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) register of journals
• PKP Index

Archiving

This journal utilizes the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) plugin, developed by PKP to digitally preserve OJS journals. The PKP PN ensures that journals that are not part of any other digital preservation service (such as CLOCKSS or Portico) can be preserved for long-term access.

Ethics and Responsibility

The International Institute for the Sociology of Law is committed to upholding the integrity of the work we publish. The value of academic publishing relies on everyone involved behaving ethically. The following points are intended to give a broad overview on our policy. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact the Editor of Oñati Socio-Legal Series (hereinafter, “OSLS” or “the journal”).

Ethical issues to consider

Authors:

• Originality and plagiarism: Authors must ensure that their work is original and entirely written by them. Where the works or words of others or of their own published writing have been used, the sources must be clearly cited or quoted, following OSLS's house style guidelines, or appropriately acknowledged, and appropriate permission must be obtained where necessary.

OSLS requires that all authors, by checking the appropriate item in the Submission Process, confirm that their submitted work has not been published before and is not under consideration at any other journal. This excludes non-commercial publication, e.g. as pre-print, proceeding, presentation, work notes, and similar formats.

If elements of a work have been previously published, including publication in Oñati Socio-Legal Series, the authors are required to acknowledge the earlier work, giving details of each publication, and to indicate how the work submitted to OSLS differs and builds upon the research and conclusions contained in the previous work. 

In the event that OSLS is made aware of any allegation of plagiarism or self-plagiarism, OSLS will deal with allegations appropriately and, if plagiarism or self-plagiarism is made evident, OSLS will ask the authors to retract the article. In any case, OSLS reserves the right to retract an article that has been proven to be plagiarised or self-plagiarised. OSLS will always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

• Research Ethics: Authors should ensure that research presented in their manuscripts has been conducted in accordance with ethical guidelines widely accepted in socio-legal scholarship, provided by either their home institutions or scientific organizations of reference. OSLS and the IISL endorse SLSA's Principles of Ethical Research Practice and recommend following these principles (https://www.slsa.ac.uk/images/slsadownloads/
  ethicalstatement/slsa%20ethics%20statement%20_final_%5b1%5d.pdf). In case of conflict or in order to establish the ethical nature of the research reflected in any particular work, OSLS may request the author(s) to ensure and express that they have followed these or other relevant ethic codes to conduct their research, and include a general disclaimer on behalf of the IISL.
• Rights: Their work must not infringe on any rights of others, including privacy rights and intellectual property rights.
• Data presentation, access, and retention: The data must be true and research results must be presented clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation. Such data must be the authors’ own or they must where necessary have permission to use data reproduced in their paper. Authors may be asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review, and should be prepared to provide public access to such data.
• Presentation of research: Research methods should be described clearly and unambiguously so that findings can be confirmed by others.
• Disclosure and conflicts of interest: Any real or apparent conflicting or competing interest must be clearly stated in the paper, including sources of funding or other support for the research.
• Significant errors in published works: If an author subsequently discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to contact the Journal to identify and correct the error or inaccuracy, and cooperate with the Journal to retract or correct the paper.
• Authorship of the paper must be accurately represented, so that all individuals that participated in the actual authorship of the work, and only those persons, are properly credited as authors, and that all who participated have given consent for publication and representation as authors.

Submissions from authors who have been published by the journal within the previous natural year will not be considered, unless the returning author is a co-author of a paper for which they are not the first author.

Reviewers must:

• Maintain the confidentiality of the review process.
• Immediately alert the Journal of any real or potential competing interest that could affect the impartiality of their reviewing and decline to review where appropriate.
• Conduct themselves fairly and impartially.
• Write their reviews with rigour and honesty, as is expected in a journal indexed in high-quality databases. Reviewers are expected to say honestly whether they recommend the article for publication in OSLS or not, and why.
• Write their reviews in a respectful manner, avoiding the use of inappropriate, demeaning, or potentially offensive language.
• Oñati Socio-Legal Series encourages use of gender-neutral language, which has been proposed to reduce both discrimination and gender stereotyping. When in doubt, reviewers are invited to refer to the editor.

Issue Editors must:

• Maintain and promote consistent ethical policies for their journal issue.
• Oversee and act to enforce those policies as needed in a fair and consistent manner.
• Exercise the highest standards of personal integrity in their work as editor of the journal, recognising and planning for instances where they could have a competing interest or the appearance of a competing interest.
• Preselect contributions for the special issue before these are sent to the journal, and exercise their right to decline contributions or to work together with authors to improve accepted contributions.
• Ensure that the content and quality requirements of all the papers from the issue are met.