- » Aim and Scope
- » Section Policies
- » Publication Frequency
- » Open Access Policy
- » Archiving
- » Peer-Review
- » Publishing Ethics
- » Indexation
- » Founder
- » Author fees
- » Disclosure and Conflict of Interest
- » Plagiarism detection
- » Preprint and postprint Policy
- » CrossMark
- » Data sharing policy
Aim and Scope
The Digital Law Journal is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal publishing theoretical and applied research on the legal regulation of digital technologies. It is an international academic journal primarily oriented toward the academic community, while also welcoming submissions from legal practitioners whose research demonstrates a high level of analytical depth and scholarly rigor.
The journal accepts manuscripts in the fields of national, international, and comparative law. It is committed to an international perspective and seeks to publish research of international relevance that contributes to the development of global legal scholarship. Interdisciplinary and empirical legal research is considered within the journal’s scope, provided that it maintains a clear legal focus and adheres to established standards of academic legal methodology.
The journal encourages research across a broad range of legal areas related to digitalization, including:
- Theoretical and philosophical foundations of digital law
- Constitutional and human rights discourse in the digital environment
- Legal aspects of artificial intelligence
- Legal regulation of data governance, privacy protection, and information security
- Online platforms: consumer protection and antitrust law
- Legal regulation of fintech, digital assets, and decentralized finance
- Electronic commerce and contract law in the online environment
- Intellectual property in the information age
- Tax and administrative law in the context of digitalization
- Labor law protection of workers in the digital era
- Legal aspects of the digital transformation of the justice system
Section Policies
Open SubmissionsPublication Frequency
The Digital Law Journal is published four times a year — in April, July, September and December.
Open Access Policy
The Digital Law Journal is an open access journal. All manuscripts are made freely available to readers immediately upon publication.
Our open access policy is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition - it means that manuscripts have free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these manuscripts, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
Archiving
National Electronic-Information Consortium (NEICON)
Peer-Review
A bilateral anonymous (double-blind) peer review method is mandatory for processing of all scientific manuscripts submitted to the editorial staff of the Digital Law Journal. This implies that neither peer reviewer is aware of the authorship of the manuscript, nor author maintains any contact with the peer reviewer.
- Members of the editorial board and leading Russian and international experts in corresponding areas of legal and economic sciences, invited as independent readers, perform peer reviews. Editor-in-chief, deputy editor-in-chief or science editor choose experts for peer review. We aim to limit the review process to 2-4 weeks, though in some cases the schedule may be adjusted at the reviewer’s request.
- Each manuscript is sent to 2 reviewers.
- Reviewer has an option to abnegate the assessment should any conflict of interests arise that may affect perception or interpretation of the manuscript. Upon the scrutiny, the peer reviewer is expected to present the editorial board with one of the following recommendations:
to accept the manuscript in its present form;
to accept the manuscript subject to minor revisions, without further peer review;
to accept the manuscript subject to minor revisions, with additional peer review;
to invite major revisions, with additional peer review;
to reject the manuscript.
- If the peer reviewer has recommended any refinements, the editorial staff would suggest the author either to implement the corrections, or to dispute them reasonably. Authors are kindly required to limit their revision to 2 months and resubmit the adapted manuscript within this period for final evaluation.
- We politely request that the editor to be notified verbally or in writing should the author decide to refuse from publishing the manuscript. In case the author fails to do so within 3 months since receiving a copy of the initial review, the editorial board takes the manuscript off the register and notifies the author accordingly.
- If author and peer reviewers meet insoluble contradictions regarding revision of the manuscript, the editor-in-chief resolves the conflict by his own authority.
- The editorial board reaches final decision to reject a manuscript on the hearing according to peer reviewers’ recommendations, and duly notifies the authors of their decision via e-mail. The board does not accept previously rejected manuscripts for re-evaluation.
- Upon the decision to accept the manuscript for publishing, the editorial staff notifies the authors of the scheduled date of publication.
- Kindly note that positive review does not guarantee the acceptance, as final decision in all cases lies with the editorial board. By his authority, editor-in-chief rules final solution of every conflict.
- Original reviews of submitted manuscripts remain deposited for 5 years.
Publishing Ethics
The Digital Law Journal follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Code of Conduct guidelines and the requirements for peer-reviewed journals, elaborated by the Elsevier Publishing House (in accordance with international ethical rules of scientific publications).
The Digital Law Journal adopted these policies and procedures to support editors, reviewers and authors in performing their ethical duties under these guidelines.
It is expected of authors, reviewers and editors that they follow the best-practice guidelines on ethical behavior contained therein.
A selection of key points is included below, but you should always refer to the documents listed above for full details.
Duties of the Publisher
Guardianship of the scholarly record
In cases of alleged or proven scientific misconduct, fraudulent publication or plagiarism, the publisher, in close collaboration with the editors, will take all appropriate measures to clarify the situation and to amend the article in question. This includes the prompt publication of an erratum, clarification or, in the most severe case, the retraction of the affected work. The publisher, together with the editors, shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, and under no circumstances encourage such misconduct or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place.
Safeguard editorial independence
The Digital Law Journal is committed to ensuring that the potential for any commercial revenue has no impact or influence on editorial decisions.
Collaborate to set industry best practice
The publisher should develop codes of practice and inculcate industry standards for best practice on ethical matters, errors and retractions. The publisher promotes best practice and provides editors with Crossref Similarity Check reports for all submissions.
Provide editors with technical, procedural & legal support
The publisher should support the editors of the Digital Law Journal in the review of complaints raised concerning ethical issues and help communications with other journals and/or publishers where this is useful to editors.
The publisher should provide specialized legal review if necessary.
Educate researchers on publishing ethics
The publisher also provides advice on publishing ethics standards, particularly for early career researchers.
Duties of Editors
Publication decision
The editor is solely and independently responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. The editor may be guided by the editorial policies of the Digital Law Journal and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The editor may confer with other editors or reviewers in making this decision.
Peer review
The editor shall ensure that the peer review process is fair, unbiased, and timely. Research articles must typically be reviewed by at least two external and independent reviewers, and where necessary the editor should seek additional opinions.
The editor shall select reviewers who have suitable expertise in the relevant field, taking account of the need for appropriate, inclusive and diverse representation. The editor shall review all disclosures of potential conflicts of interest and suggestions for self-citation made by reviewers in order to determine whether there is any potential for bias.
Fair play
The editor should evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors. When nominating potential editorial board members, the editor shall take account of the need for appropriate, inclusive and diverse representation.
The editorial policies of the journal should encourage transparency and complete, honest reporting, and the editor should ensure that peer reviewers and authors have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. The editor shall use the journal’s standard electronic submission system for all journal communications.
The editor shall establish, along with the publisher, a transparent mechanism for appeal against editorial decisions.
Journal metrics
The editor must not attempt to influence the journal’s ranking by artificially increasing any journal metric. In particular, the editor shall not require that references to that (or any other) journal’s articles be included except for genuine scholarly reasons and authors should not be required to include references to the editor’s own articles or products and services in which the editor has an interest.
Confidentiality
The editor must protect the confidentiality of all material submitted to the journal and all communications with reviewers, unless otherwise agreed with the relevant authors and reviewers. In exceptional circumstances and in consultation with the publisher, the editor may share limited information with editors of other journals where deemed necessary to investigate suspected research misconduct. The editor must protect reviewers’ identities.
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor's own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.
Declaration of competing interests
Any potential editorial conflicts of interest should be declared to the publisher in writing prior to the appointment of the editor, and then updated if and when new conflicts arise. The publisher may publish such declarations in the journal.
The editor must not be involved in decisions about papers which s/he has written him/herself or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest. Further, any such submission must be subject to all of the journal’s usual procedures, peer review must be handled independently of the relevant author/editor and their research groups, and there must be a clear statement to this effect on any such paper that is published.
Vigilance over published record
The editor should work to safeguard the integrity of the published record by reviewing and assessing reported or suspected misconduct (research, publication, reviewer and editorial), in conjunction with the publisher (or society).
The editor shall further make appropriate use of the publisher’s systems for the detection of misconduct, such as plagiarism.
An editor presented with convincing evidence of misconduct should coordinate with the publisher (and/or society) to arrange the prompt publication of a correction, retraction, expression of concern, or other correction to the record, as may be relevant.
Duties of Reviewers
Contribution to Editorial Decisions
Peer review assists the editor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper. Peer review is an essential component of formal scholarly communication, and lies at the heart of the scientific method. In addition to the specific ethics-related duties described below, reviewers are asked generally to treat authors and their work as they would like to be treated themselves and to observe good reviewing etiquette.
Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and decline to participate in the review process.
Confidentiality
Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not share the review or information about the paper with anyone or contact the authors directly without permission from the editor.
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.
Alertness to Ethical Issues
A reviewer should be alert to potential ethical issues in the paper and should bring these to the attention of the editor, including any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which the reviewer has personal knowledge. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation.
Standards of Objectivity & Competing Interests
Reviews should be conducted objectively. Reviewers should be aware of any personal bias they may have and take this into account when reviewing a paper. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Referees should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
Reviewers should consult the editor before agreeing to review a paper where they have potential conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
If a reviewer suggests that an author includes citations to the reviewer’s (or their associates’) work, this must be for genuine scientific reasons and not with the intention of increasing the reviewer’s citation count or enhancing the visibility of their work (or that of their associates).
Duties of Authors
Reporting standards
Authors should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable.
Review and professional publication articles should also be accurate and objective, and editorial ‘opinion’ works should be clearly identified as such.
Data Access and Retention
Authors may be asked to provide the research data supporting their paper for editorial review and/or to comply with the open data requirements of the journal. Authors should be prepared to provide public access to such data, if practicable, and should be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable number of years after publication.
Originality and Acknowledgement of Sources
The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted and permission has been obtained where necessary.
Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have influenced the reported work and that give the work appropriate context within the larger scholarly record. Information obtained privately, as in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, must not be used or reported without explicit, written permission from the source.
Plagiarism takes many forms, from ‘passing off’ another’s paper as the author’s own paper, to copying or paraphrasing substantial parts of another’s paper (without attribution), to claiming results from research conducted by others. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical behaviour and is unacceptable.
Multiple, Redundant or Concurrent Publication
An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal of primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical behaviour and is unacceptable.
In general, an author should not submit for consideration in another journal a paper that has been published previously, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis or as an electronic preprint.
Publication of some kinds of articles (e.g. clinical guidelines, translations) in more than one journal is sometimes justifiable, provided certain conditions are met. The authors and editors of the journals concerned must agree to the secondary publication, which must reflect the same data and interpretation of the primary document. The primary reference must be cited in the secondary publication. Further detail on acceptable forms of secondary publication can be can be found at www.icmje.org.
Confidentiality
Information obtained in the course of confidential services, such as refereeing manuscripts or grant applications, must not be used without the explicit written permission of the author of the work.
Authorship of the Paper
Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors.
Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be recognised in the acknowledgements section.
The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.
Authors are expected to consider carefully the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission. Only in exceptional circumstances will the Editor consider (at their discretion) the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been submitted and the author must clearly flag any such request to the Editor. All authors must agree with any such addition, removal or rearrangement.
Authors take collective responsibility for the work. Each individual author is accountable for ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Declaration of Competing Interests
WAME define conflict of interest as “a divergence between an individual’s private interests (competing interests) and his or her responsibilities to scientific and publishing activities, such that a reasonable observer might wonder if the individual’s behavior or judgment was motivated by considerations of his or her competing interests”. All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could be viewed as inappropriately influencing (bias) their work.
All sources of financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article should be disclosed, as should the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement then this should be stated.
Examples of potential conflicts of interest which should be disclosed include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest possible stage.
Notification of Fundamental Errors
When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper if deemed necessary by the editor. If the editor or the publisher learn from a third party that a published work contains an error, it is the obligation of the author to cooperate with the editor, including providing evidence to the editor where requested.
Image Integrity
It is not acceptable to enhance, obscure, move, remove, or introduce a specific feature within an image. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if and as long as they do not obscure or eliminate any information present in the original. Manipulating images for improved clarity is accepted, but manipulation for other purposes could be seen as scientific ethical abuse and will be dealt with accordingly.
Authors should comply with any specific policy for graphical images applied by the relevant journal, e.g. providing the original images as supplementary material with the article, or depositing these in a suitable repository.
Indexation
Digital Law Journal is indexed in:
- DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
- Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. The Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest scholarly publishers, plus scholarly books and other non-peer reviewed journals.
- Dimensions data and solutions for discovery and analytics. Dimensions covers millions of research publications connected by more than 1.6 billion citations, supporting grants, datasets, clinical trials, patents and policy documents.
- Russian Science Citation Index is a database, accumulating information on papers by Russian scientists, published in native and foreign titles. The Science Index project has been under development by "Electronic Scientific Library" since 2005.
- WorldCat.org is a global catalog of library materials. WorldCat contained over 512 million bibliographic records in 483 languages
- HeinOnline is a premier online research platform that provides more than 244 million pages of multidisciplinary periodicals, essential government documents, international resources, case law, and much more. What started as a legal publishing firm 100 years ago has since become so much more. William S. Hein & Co., Inc. has been serving the library community since the 1920s, publishing books, producing microfiche, and, now in the digital age, creating multidisciplinary databases that go beyond just law—gathering reputable primary and secondary sources from around the world to make research easier for students, faculty, librarians, attorneys, governments, organization, and individuals of all skill levels.
- Ulrich's Periodical Directory (Ulrichsweb) provides web-based and Z39.50 linking to library catalogs. The online version includes over 300,000 active and current periodicals.
Founder
Maxim Inozemtsev
Author fees
Publication in the Digital Law Journal is free of charge for all the authors.
The journal does not have any manuscript processing charges.
The journal does not have any manuscript submission charges.
Disclosure and Conflict of Interest
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.
Peer reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
Plagiarism detection
The Digital Law Journal uses native russian-language plagiarism detection software Antiplagiat to screen the submissions. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.
Preprint and postprint Policy
Prior to acceptance and publication in the Digital Law Journal, authors may make their submissions available as preprints on personal or public websites.
As part of submission process, authors are required to confirm that the submission has not been previously published, nor has been submitted. After a manuscript has been published in the Digital Law Journal, it is suggested that the link to the manuscript on journal's website is used when the manuscript is shared on personal or public websites.
CrossMark
CrossMark is a multi-publisher initiative from Crossref, provides a standard way for readers to locate the authoritative version of an article or other published content. By applying the CrossMark logo, the Digital Law Journal is committing to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to the possible changes.
Clicking the CrossMark logo on a document will tell you its current status and may also give you additional publication-record information about the document.
Data sharing policy
Authors are encouraged to make the research data that support their publications available but are not required to do so. The decision to publish will not be affected by whether or not authors share their research data.
Definition of research data
This policy applies to the research data that would be required to verify the results of research reported in manuscripts published in the Digital Law Journal. Research data include data produced by the authors (“primary data”) and data from other sources that are analysed by authors in their study (“secondary data”). Research data include any recorded factual materials that are used to produce the results in digital and non-digital form. This includes tabular data, code, images, audio, documents, video, maps, raw and/or processed data.
Definition of exceptions
The data that are not subject to public disclosure may be delivered as follows: deposited in science data repositories with limited access or preliminary anonymised. An author can also publicly deliver metadata only and/or description of the method of access to the data under requests from other scholars.
Data repositories
The preferred mechanism for sharing research data is via data repositories. More information about finding research data repositories is available at https://repositoryfinder.datacite.org/.
Data citation
The Editorial Board of the Digital Law Journal welcomes access to data under Creative Commons Licenses. The Editorial Board of the Digital Law Journal does not insist on the obligatory use of Creative Commons in case when the data is deposited in the repositories of the third party. The Publisher of the Digital Law Journal does not assert any copyrights for the data submitted by the author together with the article.
Questions regarding the observation of that policy shall be sent to the editor-in-chief of the Digital Law Journal.
