NotaBene and its academic editors are committed to fair and professional dealing in every aspect of the publishing process. We aim at publishing original state-of-the-art work of value to the intellectual community that will make a clear contribution to current debate in humanities. We strive to meet the highest possible standards and we expect our reviewers and authors to do so. Honesty, originality and fair dealing on the part of authors, and fairness, objectivity and confidentiality on the part of editors and reviewers are among the priorities that help us to achieve our aim.

The NotaBene journal publishes scholar articles, studies, essays and reviews in Bulgarian, English, Russian, German, Italian and Spanish as well as translations into Bulgarian of philosophical and political texts. Being based on the understanding that art is intertwined with philosophy, it provides also a platform for poetic texts and works of photography. All materials are published free of charge and are subject to the rules of plagiarism. The authors assume full responsibility for the content of their texts.

The NotaBene journal accepts and follows the Code of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), available free of charge at http://publicationethics.org/. Relevant documents include: Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors and Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers.

Open Access Statement

NotaBene is a Free Open Access Journal. It follows the Budapest Initiative for Free and Open Access to Scientific Materials via the Internet - BOAI. The content of all the texts is freely available and free of charge. The users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute or use the texts for any other legitimate purposes, being required to cite correctly the source.

Peer review

All submissions will be original manuscripts. In all cases, the manuscripts submitted for publication are reviewed by at least two independent anonymous reviewers, according to the peer review system. When disagreement appears, it will be asked the advice of a third reviewer. Reviewers should be experts in the field and have no relationship, professional or personal, with the author(s) of the assessed articles. Editors are responsible for not inviting as reviewers experts who are affiliated with the same institution as the author(s) and/or might be in conflict of interest with them. However, should any reviewer realise that she/he is in conflict of interest with the author(s), she/he must immediately declare it to the editors. In order to minimize the possibility of conflict of interest, NotaBene collaborates with a vast network of reviewers belonging to various national and international research institutions.    

Responsibilities of the participants in the publication process:

Editors have the following responsibilities:

• They should confirm the receipt of the submitted manuscripts within three working days;  
• They should make fair and unbiased decisions independent of commercial considerations, and should ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process;
• They should adopt editorial policies that encourage maximum transparency and complete, honest reporting;
• They  should guard the integrity of the published record by issuing corrections and retractions when needed and pursuing suspected or alleged research and publication misconduct;
• They   should have appropriate policies in place for handling editorial conflicts of interest.
• They should make a preliminary assessment and direct the texts for review;
• They ensure that all manuscripts submitted for publication are reviewed by at least two independent anonymous reviewers;
• They are responsible for not inviting as reviewers experts who are affiliated with the same institution as the author(s) of manuscript and/or might be in conflict of interest with them; 
• They should not use any part or data from the submitted manuscripts for their own purposes before the manuscripts are published.

The author(s) have the following responsibilities:

·         The author(s) ensure that the submitted manuscripts are original;

·         They should be familiar with the instructions to the authors presented on the Journal’s website;

·         They should not submit manuscripts that have already been published somewhere else, but joint publications with paper-based editions as well as announcements for future prints are allowed.

Reviewers have the following responsibilities:

·         They should treat manuscripts confidentially;

·         In case they are in conflict of interest with the author(s) they must immediately declare it to the editors and reject the invitation to assess the manuscript;

·         They are not allowed to use any parts or data from the texts they review before they are published.