Focus and Scope

Electrochemical Materials and Technologies (EM&T) is a peer-reviewed, international open access journal publishing original and high-quality articles, reviews, and letters, covering all applied aspects of electrochemistry, materials science and technologies for electrochemical applications. EM&T is dedicated to providing an exclusive platform that generates discussions among researchers, scientists, engineers, and technology developers around advances, current trends and challenges in electrochemistry, characterisation and testing of functional materials in terms of their orientation towards industry and large-scale production.

The following aspects are of EM&T's particular interest:

• All aspects of modern electrochemistry and materials for electrochemical applications;
• Complex characterisation and testing of functional  materials;
• Design and engineering of new materials for applied electrochemical purposes;
• Lab-to-industry technology transferring for current electrochemical and energy demands.

Section Policies

From Editors

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Articles

Articles are conventional full-length research publications covering a study subject in a thorough and concise manner. No restrictions are imposed on the length of Articles; however, such texts normally include maximum 12 illustrative materials (figures, schemes and/or tables) and 60 references. If required, additional materials can be provided as supplementary data. Articles should also include an abstract not exceeding 250 words and a keyword list consisting of 5–8 words and phrases. Articles typically comprise four sections (Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion and, finally, Conclusions). However, the number of such sections can be increased if necessary (e.g., Theoretical Background, Computational Details, Model Validation, etc.).

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Reviews

Review articles in EM&T can be of two major types: Focus Reviews and Comprehensive Reviews.

Focus Reviews represent critical and concise personal opinions covering most recent research activities on topics of interest. Focus reviews are restricted to 4,000 words in the article body (without abstract, figure and table captions, and references), five visual elements (figures, schemes and/or tables) and 40–50 references (a half of which should be published within the past 2–3 years). Additional materials can be provided as supplementary data. Focus Reviews should also include an abstract not exceeding 150 words, a keyword list comprising 5–6 words and phrases, 3–5 highlights (short sentences conveying the core findings, about 10–20 words each) and a brief biography (100 words maximum) completed with a photo for each co-author.

Comprehensive Reviews represent a complete, systematic and well-organized analysis of a specific research field. No restrictions are imposed on the length of Comprehensive Reviews; however, such submissions typically include maximum 15 illustrative materials (figures, schemes and/or tables). Additional illustrative materials can be included as supplementary data. Comprehensive Reviews should also include an abstract not exceeding 250 words, a keyword list comprising 5–8 words and phrases and a brief biography (100 words maximum) completed with a photo for each co-author. No restrictions are imposed on the number of references (150 and more); however, the author(s) are requested to provide a list of 10 most significant cited papers.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Focus Reviews

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Letters

Letters are short communications that present concise reports on important results intended for rapid dissemination. Letters are restricted to 3,000 words in the article body (without abstract, figure and table captions, and references), 4 illustrative materials (figures, schemes and/or tables) and 20 references. Additional representative materials can be provided as supplementary data. Letters should include a brief abstract not exceeding 100 words, 5–6 keywords and 3–5 highlights (short sentences conveying the core findings, about 10–20 words each). Letters present a completed (not fragmented, not “salami”) study, whose results can be used as a basis for further research into the nature of the revealed phenomena.

The checklist below summarizes the specific features of papers accepted for publication in EM&T.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

Each new paper should be submitted via the Online Submission system. After that, members of the international Editorial Board check out if the manuscript is prepared in accordance with the Author Guidelines and whether it falls within the scope of EM&T. Decisions on whether to send a manuscript out for peer review are generally made within a week of receipt.

All manuscripts that meet the journal's requirements will be peer-reviewed by one of the Editorial Board members and at least one external referee assigned by the editors. If the Editorial Board members are unable to perform a review, two external referees will be involved. At the submission stage (in Comments for the Editor) authors might suggest referees as well as indicate those who should not review the paper. These suggestions are often helpful, although they are not always followed. The EM&T journal uses a "Single blind peer review" model in which the names of the reviewers are hidden from the authors. The manuscripts prepared during a special invitation of the Editorial Board (as-called invited papers) are internally reviewed by Editor(s) of the EM&T journal.

All the manuscript submitted in the EM&T journals go through the standard peer-review process. The following decision can be done after the peer-review:

• Accept submission:

The decision is usually made after one or several peer-review round(s). The accepted manuscript is forwarded to the production team for preparing the final manuscript version to be published at the EM&T website. The authors have the opportunity to provide the last minor changes during proofreading.

• Revisions required:

This decision is formulated based on reviewer’s/reviewers’ comments. The authors should provide (i) a separate "response to reviewer(s)" letter, in which each change made is outlined as raised in the reviewer comments, and (ii) a suitable rebuttal to each reviewer comment, which is not addressed in the revised version of the manuscript.  The revision should be performed within 2 weeks. The authors are obligated to contact the Editorial office, if they need a longer period for revisions.

• Technical revision: 

This decision can be applied before the peer-review process in case of technical issues. The authors are invited to eliminate these issues within 1 week.

• Reject:

The paper suffers from serious scientific flaws, and/or has weak novelty, significance and impact signs. This decision can be made after either preliminary checking by the Editorial office or collecting the comments from reviewer(s). The rejected manuscript can be resubmitted, if all principal comments and remarks are completely addressed.

Bear in mind that the editors have the final decision on acceptance of the manuscript for publication. Authors have the right to appeal to the editors against any decision taken on their manuscript at any stage by sending a rebuttal letter to the editor via the journal email. Such a letter should explain clearly why you disagree with the decision on your manuscript, and should include a detailed response to any reviewers’ comments.

Open Access Policy

Open access means immediate, worldwide, unrestricted access to the full text of all published articles, ensuring far greater distribution of an author's work than the traditional subscription-based publishing model. In accordance with the original Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration, by "open access" to the full texts of the articles we mean their free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, 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. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, is to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. As stated in the Copyright Notice, authors who publish in Electrochemical Materials and Technologies retain the copyright of their work, which is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License enabling the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of an article, provided that the original work is properly cited.

Publication Fees

Electrochemical Materials and Technologies requires no author charges, including submission fees, editorial processing charges, article processing charges (APCs), etc. (see Journal Sponsorship).

Editorial Policies

The following Code of Ethics of the Editorial Board of Electrochemical Materials and Technologies ("Journal") is composed on the basis of internationally recognized standards of ethics, such as those recommended by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) in its Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

General duties and responsibilities of editors

• Editors are accountable for everything published in the Journal;
• Editors take all reasonable steps to ensure the quality of the material they publish;
• Editors ensure that all published articles have been reviewed by suitably qualified referees and that the peer review is fair, unbiased and timely;
• Editors maintain the integrity of the academic record;
• Editors strive to constantly improve their journal;
• Editors preclude business and commercial needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards;
• Editors publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed;
• Editorial decisions are not affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors.

Relations with authors

• Editors’ decisions to accept or reject a paper for publication are based on the paper’s importance, originality and clarity, and the study’s validity and its relevance to the scope of the journal;
• Editors do not reverse decisions to accept submissions and do not overturn decisions of other editors unless serious problems are identified with the submission;
• Editors abide by established in the Journal peer review practices, which are described in details on the Journal's web site;
• Editors publish guidance to authors on everything that is expected of them, and provide technical support when requested;
• Authors have a right to appeal against any editorial decisions.
• Authors have the opportunity to withdraw their manuscript if they wish at any peer review stage. However, a detailed justification for this decision should be provided to the editor.

Relations with reviewers

• Editors provide guidance to reviewers on everything that is expected of them;
• Editors require reviewers to disclose any potential competing interests before agreeing to review a submission;
• Editors require reviewers to handle submitted material in confidence;
• Editors encourage reviewers to comment on ethical questions and possible cases of academic dishonesty;
• Editors monitor the performance of peer reviewers and take steps to ensure this is of high standard, ceasing to use reviewers who consistently produce discourteous, low quality or late reviews.

Relations with editorial board members

• Editors provide new editorial board members with guidelines on everything that is expected of them and keep existing members updated on new policies and developments;
• Editors identify suitably qualified editorial board members who can actively contribute to the development and good management of the journal;
• Articles submitted by the journal employees or members of the Editorial Board are evaluated on a general basis being given no advantages over the other authors' manuscripts.

Relations with journal owners and publishers

• The owner and publisher of the Journal is Ural Federal University;
• Ural Federal University as well as the other agencies outside of the journal itself do not interfere with the editorial decisions on which articles to publish.

Dealing with academic dishonesty

Academic dishonesty in any way is NOT tolerated by the Journal. Some examples of such misconducts along with the good practices that must be used by the authors are presented below.

• Improper Authorship: authorship must be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the research presented;
• Citation Manipulation: submitted manuscript must not contain citations whose sole purpose is to increase the number of citations to a given author's works, or to the articles published in a given journal;
• Plagiarism and Duplicate Submission: since the Journal is committed to publishing only original papers, submitted manuscripts must not be published elsewhere, or be under review elsewhere, and the results or the words of others must be appropriately cited or quoted;
• Redundant Publications: there must be no undue fragmentation of the research into several papers;
• Data Fabrication and Falsification: submitted manuscripts must not contain either fabricated or intentionally falsified experimental results, and when an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his own published work, it is the author's obligation to notify the Editors in order to retract or correct the paper;
• Intellectual property infringement: submitted manuscripts must not violate intellectual property rights and conventions;
• Undisclosure of Conflicts of Interest: any possible Conflicts of Interests must be properly disclosed.

Editors at first seek a response from those suspected of academic dishonesty. This response is discussed by Editor-in-Chief and the members of the Editorial Board. In case the response is found not convincing, the Editors reserve the right to impose one or several of the following sanctions:

• Immediate rejection of the manuscript under consideration;
• Immediate rejection of any other manuscript submitted to the Journal by the authors of the infringing paper;
• Making a public statement about the discovery of the academic dishonesty facts.

Note that the latter will be reserved only for the most severe cases of the academic dishonesty.

Ethics in Publishing

Parallel submission

It is unethical and not permissible for author(s) to simultaneously submit essentially the same manuscript to the EMT and other journal(s). Plagiarism in any form will not be tolerated. The submission of a multi-authored manuscript by a corresponding author implies that all co-authors had made significant contributions to the work.

Research Results

Authors must not fabricate, falsify or misrepresent data or results. They should strive to be objective, unbiased and truthful in all aspects of their work.

Authors must be honest in making claims for the results and conclusions of their research. Making inflated claims for a project interferes with the objective evaluation of its results and applications, and can lead to an unfair and wasteful distribution of resources.

Authors should strive to avoid mistakes in research and exercise due diligence in presenting high quality work for publication. They should critically assess the likelihood of experimental, methodological and human errors and avoid self-deception and bias. Where possible they should conduct an internal review to assess the validity of their work before publication.

Authorship and contributorship

Authorship

All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following:

1. The conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data.
2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
3. Final approval of the version to be submitted.

All authors should agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work to ensure that the questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Changes to authorship

The editors of the journal generally will not consider changes to authorship once a manuscript has been submitted. It is important that authors carefully consider the authorship list and order of authors and provide a definitive author list at original submission.

The policy of the journal around authorship changes:

• All authors must be listed in the manuscript and their details entered into the submission system.
• Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should only be made prior to acceptance, and only if approved by the journal editor.
• Requests to change authorship should be made by the corresponding author, who must provide the reason for the request to the journal editor with written confirmation from all authors, including any authors being added or removed, that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement.
• Only in exceptional circumstances will the journal editor consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors post acceptance.
• Publication of the manuscript may be paused while a change in authorship request is being considered.
• Any authorship change requests approved by the journal editor will result in a corrigendum if the manuscript has already been published.
• Any unauthorised authorship changes may result in the rejection of the article, or retraction, if the article has already been published.

Conflicts of Interests

Conflict of interest (COI) exists when there is a divergence between an individual’s private interest (competing interest) and his abilities to act as an unbiased author, editor or reviewer. The most obvious conflicts of interests include

• Financial ties - when authors receive funding from an organization with an interest in the particular outcome of the work;
• Affiliation - when an author is an employee or a member of an organization with an interest in the particular outcome of the work.

Everyone has COIs of some sort. Having a competing interest is not in itself unethical. However, COI constitutes a problem when it could reasonably be expected to hinder one's abilities to produce an unbiased research or review. When in doubt, it's better to declare the potential conflicts of interests. The rules for disclosure of COIs, established in Electrochemical Materials and Technologies, are listed below.

Authors

Authors are requested to disclose interests that are directly or indirectly related to the work submitted for publication. Disclosure of interests provides a complete and transparent process, helping readers form their own judgments of potential bias.

Reviewers

Reviewers should not be involved in the peer review process if they fulfill one of the following conditions:

• Reviewer is a co-authors of the current submission;
• Reviewer has the same affiliation with that of any author;
• Reviewer collaborate(ed) with any author within the last 5 years;
• Reviewer has financial (or other related) interest;
• Reviewer feels unable to be completely objective in their judgements.

Editorial Board Members

Editorial Board Members (EBMs) are required to declare any competing interests and may be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists. In addition, they should be exclude from handling manuscripts in the following cases:

• EBM is a co-authors of the current submission;
• EBM has financial (or other related) interest.

If EBM is an author of a submitted manuscript, the Editor-in-Chief will be assigned to manage the peer-review process. If the Editor-in-Chief is an author of a submitted manuscript, handling this manuscript is carried out by one of EBMs. In both cases, these should be declared in the ‘Conflict of interest’ section on the submitted manuscript. Editorial Board Members are welcome to submit their manuscripts to EMT. However, these submissions will not be given priority over other manuscripts, and the status of Editorial Board Member has no influence on the editorial consideration. The following endogeneity rule applies: the proportion of published research papers where at least one of the authors is an Editor, Editorial Board Member, or Reviewer must not exceed 25% in either of the last two issues.

The Declaration of Interests should always be completed. The resulting Word document containing your declaration should be uploaded at the "attach/upload files" step in the submission process. Author signatures are not required. Authors with no competing interests to declare may use the following phrase: "The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper".

Copyright

Authors publishing their manuscripts in the Electrochemical Materials and Technologies retain copyright in their work, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the article provided the original work is properly cited.

Data sharing and reproducibility

The journal encourages and enables authors to share data that supports their research publication where appropriate, and enables them to interlink the data with published articles. Research data refers to the results of observations or experimentation that validate research findings, which may also include software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods and other useful materials related to the project.

Ethical oversight

Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: 

• Publishers and editors will take all the reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including but not limited to plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others.
• In no case a journal or its editors encourage such misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place.
• In the event that a journal’s publisher and/or editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article in the journal, the publisher and/or editor will follow Committee on Publication Ethics rules in dealing with allegations. 

Declaration of generative AI in scientific writing

The below guidance only refers to the writing process, and not to the use of AI tools to analyze and draw insights from data as part of the research process.

Where authors use generative artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process, authors should only use these technologies to improve readability and language. Applying the technology should be done with human oversight and control, and authors should carefully review and edit the result, as AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete or biased. AI and AI-assisted technologies should not be listed as an author or co-author, or be cited as an author. Authorship implies responsibilities and tasks that can only be attributed to and performed by humans.

Authors should disclose in their manuscript the use of AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process by following the instructions below. A statement will appear in the published work. Please note that authors are ultimately responsible and accountable for the contents of the work.

Disclosure instructions

Authors must disclose the use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process by adding a statement at the end of their manuscript in the core manuscript file, before the References list. The statement should be placed in a new section entitled 'Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process'

Statement: During the preparation of this work the author(s) used [NAME TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the publication

This declaration does not apply to the use of basic tools for checking grammar, spelling, references etc. If there is nothing to disclose, there is no need to add a statement.

Proof correction

To ensure a fast publication process of the article, we kindly ask authors to provide us with their proof corrections within two days. Corresponding authors will receive an e-mail with the PDF version of manuscript, allowing annotation and correction of proofs: in addition to editing text, the author can also comment on figures/tables. All instructions for proofing will be given in the e-mail we send to corresponding author.

We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. It is important to ensure that all corrections are sent back to us in one communication. Please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility.

Post-publication discussions and corrections

If an error occurs

It is, of course, recognized that errors will occur from time to time. When an error is discovered in published or submitted work, the mistake should be admitted and a corrigendum, erratum or retraction should be published. Corrections should be approved by all authors of the original article unless there is a particular reason why this is not possible. In these cases, any dissent among the authors should be noted in the published correction.

Electrochemical Materials and Technologies, 2022-2024

ISSN 2949-0561 (Online)

License "серия Эл № ФС77-84010" (выдана 30.09.2022 Федеральной службой по надзору в сфере связи, информационных технологий и массовых коммуникаций)

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