Submission

All submissions should be made online at the the Science – Future of Lithuania site https://journals.vilniustech.lt/index.php/MLA by using "Make a Submission" button.

New users will need to create an account. Once logged on to the site authors may make a submission or check the status of the manuscript.

Peer-review and decisions

The journal uses double-blind peer review (neither the authors nor the reviewers know the identity of each other) to avoid bias. See the journal policies Peer review.

Manuscripts should be submitted as two separate files in Word format (see in Template of a manuscript).

After submission all articles are evaluated by the editorial office and may be immediately rejected if they are considered to be out of the journal's scope or otherwise unfit for consideration. Articles which passed initial evaluation will be sent out for external review. Reviewer reports with a decision from the editor will be returned to the authors as soon as possible, but please be patient as reviewing can take up to 60 days.

After review, the editor will make a decision of: reject, accept, or revise. Revisions may be major or minor. If a decision of revision is made, authors are asked to make their revisions as quickly as possible – if there are extensive delays in revising an article then it may be considered a new submission. Revised articles may be sent out for review again, depending on the level of revision requested.

Publication charges

The journal is an open access peer-reviewed journal owned by Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VILNIUS TECH) . It is completely free of charges to both authors and readers because all publication fees are covered by VILNIUS TECH.

See the journal policies Fees and Charges.

 

Copyright and publication

During submission you will be asked to sign various warranties about the article (see Journal policies). These include affirming that it is original and does not infringe any legal or personal rights (e.g. copyright, libel or privacy). Authors retain copyright in their articles, but grant VILNIUS TECH the right of the first publication.

All papers will be published open access under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence. This ensures that they receive the maximum dissemination because there are no barriers to access. This licence allows readers to disseminate and reuse the paper, but always requires them to grant the authors and the first publication full credit.

See the journal policies Open access.

 

Article types

The journal welcomes all original submissions of articles and reviews that comply with the Aims and Scope of the journal.

All submissions must be original papers, and not be under consideration by a journal elsewhere.

If the paper contains anything that has already been published (e.g. figures) then this must be declared and authors are responsible for obtaining relevant permissions to republish. Evidence of permission granted must be available if requested – see in Reproduction of copyright material.

Template of a manuscript

The paper should be submitted in two different word documents. The linked <Word template for Title Page> and <Word template for Anonymized Document> should be used for the preparation of the manuscript for this journal.

Title page should include a title of the paper, authors names, institutional affiliations, addresses, e-mails, ORCID, identification of the corresponding author, abstract and key words of the paper. Acknowledgements, Funding, Disclosure statement, and Contribution should be provided only in a title page (excluded from Anonymized Document file) in order to ensure author anonymity.

Anonymized document should include a title, abstract, key words, the main body text where personal data excluded in order to ensure author anonymity (it should be provided in Title Page file) and references. The personal information will be included in the accepted manuscript after peer-review process.

General guidelines

Only English language articles are accepted. Authors are responsible for the language quality in their article, and is strongly recommended to have your manuscript checked by a native speaker or an English language specialist before submission, in order to ensure that the language is acceptable.

For all manuscripts non-discriminatory language is mandatory. Sexist or racist terms must not be used.

Authors should provide the following information:

• – Full name
• – Affiliation (where the author was positioned when the research was undertaken – if authors change affiliation before publishing this should be given as a footnote)
• – Address
• – Email address
• – ORCiD, this is not mandatory, but highly recommended for the benefit of authors: unique author identifier that ensures that all your works are correctly attributed to you – see https://orcid.org
• – Clear identification of the corresponding author (who will be responsible for ensuring that the correct version is submitted and that all authors agree to publication and approve any corrections during peer review and after acceptance).

Each article must comprise:

• – An informative title: ensure that it clearly explains what the article is about (not exceed 20 words)
• – An abstract of approximately 200 words: this should summarise the article, not simply introduce the topic
• – Between 6–10 key words
• – The main body of text should not exceed 6000–8000 words and should comprise:
• An introduction to the topic, describing the research question being addressed
• Methodology and/or theoretical framework
• Results of the research
• Discussion and interpretation of results obtained
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgements, funding, declarations of conflict of interest, authors' contribution, etc.
• References

Text sections may be numbered sequentially for clarity. Introduction, Conclusions, References are not numbered.

Authors must adhere to SI units. Units are not italicised. When using a word which is or is asserted to be a proprietary term or trade mark, authors must use the symbol ® or TM

Equations

Formulas, equations and their components presented in the text must be written in Equation Editor. The size of basic symbols in equations should correspond to the letter size of the main text – 10 pt; indexes should be in 7 pt, sub-indexes – 6 pt. For more details see the Template of the Manuscript.

Tables

Tables should be created in Word or Excel and should be designed so that they easily fit a regular journal page. Each table should be numbered sequentially throughout the article and mentioned in the main text.

Each table must have an informative caption to describe the table. They may have footnotes if explanations of abbreviations, etc., are required.

Figures

Figures may be supplied within the text file at submission, but on article acceptance they must be supplied as separate files.

Each figure should be numbered sequentially throughout the article and mentioned in the main text. Each figure must have an informative caption to describe the figure.

Please be sure that all figures are at the appropriate resolution: 1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for colour.

Diagrams, charts and schemes: font – Times New Roman from 5 to 8 pt, line thickness – from 0.3 to 2 pt, file formats – *.pdf, *.eps, *.cdr, *.xls, *.xlsx, *.dwg.

Author Contributions and Acknowledgments

Each person who made an intellectual contribution to the research, and the evaluation/analysis and to the writing of the article (see the ICMJE definition of authorship) should be named as an author.

People who contributed to the work (but do not fulfil the authorship criteria) should be listed in the Acknowledgments, along with their contributions. You must ensure that anyone named in the acknowledgments agrees to being named.

See the journal poliecies Authorship.

Conflict of Interest

Authors must also provide a disclosure statement within the article which will acknowledge any financial, professional, personal interest or benefit they have arising from the direct applications of their research.

Funding

Please supply all details required by any funding and grant-awarding bodies as Funding in a separate paragraph as follows:

• For single agency grants:
• This work was supported by the <Funding Agency> under Grant [number xxxx].

• For multiple agency grants:
• This work was supported by the <Funding Agency #1> under Grant [number xxxx]; <Funding Agency #2> under Grant [number xxxx]; and <Funding Agency #3> under Grant [number xxxx].

References

The Journal uses the APA Style (author–date method) short reference system for citations in the text with an alphabetical list at the end of the paper. Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list and vice versa. Please check if all names and surnames of the authors, also the details (title, year, volume, pages, etc.) in the list of references are correct.

In the text use the following style examples:

• This was discussed by Smart (2016)…" – single author item
• This was discussed in full (Smart, 2016)" – single author item
• This was discussed in full (Smart & Burkart, 2016) – two authors
• This was discussed in full (Smart et al., 2016)…" – 3 or more authors
• This was discussed in full (P. Smart, 2016; S. Smart, 2017)…" where items have similar author names
• This was discussed in full (Smart, 2016a, 2016b)…" where two or more items are published in the same year

Reference examples:

Book

• Montgomery, D. C. (2012). Introduction to statistical quality control (7th ed.). Wiley.

Book chapter

• Slack, B. (2007). The terminalisation of seaports. In J. Wang, D. Olivier, T. Notteboom, & B. Slack (Eds.), Ports, cities, and global supply chains (pp. 41–50). Ashgate.

Journal article

• Badami, M. G., & Haider, M. (2007). An analysis of public bus transit performance in Indian cities. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 41(10), 961–981. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2007.06.002

Conference proceedings

• Saraiji, R., Harb, A., & Hamdan, M. O. (2011). Performance of LED street lights in hot environments. In K. Domke & C. A. Brebbia (Eds.), Light in engineering, architecture and environment (pp. 147–158). WIT Press. https://doi.org/10.2495/LIGHT110131
  
  
• Brown, S., & Caste, V. (2004, May). Integrated obstacle detection framework. Paper presented at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, Detroit, MI.

Thesis or dissertation

• Suwetwattanakul, C. (2010). Developing a knowledge sharing model for the implementation of the learning organization in Thailand (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.

Internet documents

• Bown, J. (2019, December 17). How charity apps may be making us more generous. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50572939

Non-book and other formats

• Sidra Intersections. (2008). User guide-introduction. Akcelik & Associates Pty Ltd.

Standards

• European Committee for Standardization. (2005). Eurocode 3: Design of steel structures – Part 1-9: Fatigue (EN 1993-1-9). https://www.phd.eng.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/en.1993.1.9.2005-1.pdf
  
•  
• International Organization for Standardization. (1998). Ergonomics of the thermal environment – Instruments for measuring physical quantities (ISO 7726:1998). Geneva, Switzerland.

Directives

• European Parliament, & Council of the European Union. (2009). Directive 2009/28/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2009 on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources and amending and subsequently repealing directives 2001/77/EC and 2003/30/EC. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32009L0028

Please use the transliterated (not translated) version of the names and sources in non-Romanian alphabet. We encourage to follow the rules for Romanization recommended by The Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html

For citing papers published in the journals available in two or more languages, please give the English citation first, followed by the original language citation.

Supplemental online material

The journal can accept supplementary files that support the submitted article (e.g. audio, movie, or text files: for example a survey questionnaire which is described in the article). Supplemental information should be provided with the submission. It will not be formally reviewed but will be considered to determine whether it is required by the article. Please note that authors take fully responsibility for the content of any supplemental information, and a disclaimer on the supplemental information must clearly state that they have not been formally reviewed.

Data

We encourage all researchers to archive and share their data. Several grant funders now require this, and we believe that it benefits research by enabling other researchers to reuse and reinterpret data for the benefit of all. We encourage all authors to make their data available in suitable repositories (for example FigShare, or other similar repository) where the item will be safely archived and given a unique reference number (DOI or similar), so that it can be cited in the authors' articles. They should then be referenced in the article (see an example ‘Data sets in repositories’ in References).

Reproduction of copyright material

If you wish to include any material in your manuscript in which you do not hold copyright, you must obtain written permission from the copyright owner, prior to submission. Such material may be in the form of text, data, table, illustration, photograph, line drawing, audio clip, video clip, film still, and screenshot, and any supplemental material you propose to include. This applies to direct (verbatim or facsimile) reproduction as well as “derivative reproduction” (where you have created a new figure or table which derives substantially from a copyrighted source).

You must ensure appropriate acknowledgement is given to the permission granted to you for reuse by the copyright holder in each figure or table caption. You are solely responsible for any fees which the copyright holder may charge for reuse.

The reproduction of short extracts of text for the purposes of criticism may be possible without formal permission on the basis that the quotation is reproduced accurately and full attribution is given.

Publication Ethics

The journals published by VILNIUS TECH all adhere to the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, https://publicationethics.org/core-practices) and follow their guidelines in respect of publication ethics and managing problems when they arise.

All authors are expected to comply with good practice in regard to their research and the reporting of their research. See further in the Journal policies.

Authors' responsibilities include the following issues:

Plagiarism. The unattributed copying of another published or unpublished work, or the theft of the ideas of another researcher is considered a serious offence. If suspected authors will be contacted and – if under review – the article will be held until the issue is resolved. Note that all articles are checked for plagiarism when submitted.

Authorship: all people who comply with the definition of authors (above) should be named as authors on the article, and, similarly, nobody who does not comply should be included as an author. Authors may not be added or deleted after submission without full explanation and written consent of all authors.

Conflict of Interest: all authors must declare if they have any conflict of interest that may have biased either their research or the article submitted.

Misleading or misreporting of findings: authors are required to ensure that they do not selectively, or incorrectly, report their findings, or use language to mislead the readers.

In all cases, the publisher reserves the rights to contact the authors' institutions is serious misconduct has been identified, and to retract any articles in which serious misconduct has been identified.

Corrections after publication

If any errors are discovered after publication the journal editors, in partnership with VILNIUS TECH and the authors will determine the right method of correction. See the Journal policies.