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Policy

ESNBU is Open Access in accordance with the definition of open access of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). This means that all published articles are freely available without charge to the users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author as long as the article original authors, citation details and publisher are identified.

Fees

ESNBU is Diamond Open Access. There are no submission fees or publication charges for authors.

Copyright

Copyright for articles published in ESNBU is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. Authors retain full publishing rights and are encouraged to upload their work to institutional repositories, social academic networking sites, etc. ESNBU is not responsible for subsequent uses of the work. It is the author's responsibility to bring an infringement action if so desired by the author.

Further to that, authors are allowed to archive the submitted version, the accepted version (Author Accepted Manuscript) and the published version (Version of Record) to any repository as long as the status of the version is clearly stated.

Exceptions to copyright policy

Occasionally ESNBU may co-publish articles jointly with other publishers, and different licensing conditions may then apply.

Access Policy and Content Licensing

All published articles on the ESNBU site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes. The terms on which the article is published allow the posting of the published article (Version of Record) in any repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Note that prior to, and including, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2024, articles were licensed under the Non-commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. The transition to CC BY 4.0 is effective as of Volume 11, Issue 1, 2025.



In other words, under the CC BY 4.0 license users are free to
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

Attribution (by) - You must give appropriate credit (Title, Author, Source, License), provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Notice: No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.

If the law requires that the article be published in the public domain, authors will notify ESNBU at the time of submission, and in such cases the article shall be released under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver CC0 1.0 Universal.

Submissions

Submissions are accepted from all researchers; authors do not need to have a connection to New Bulgarian University to publish in ESNBU. Submission of the manuscript represents that the manuscript has not been published previously, is not considered for publication elsewhere and will not be submitted elsewhere unless it is rejected or withdrawn.

Submissions are to be made from the author's institutional email address. Submissions from commercial email addresses are only considered from independent scholars who are not affiliated with an institution at the time of submission, and authors who have already published with us and who we already know.

Contributor Roles in Multiple-author Submissions

During submission the authors declare all Contributor Roles have been described and agreed by all authors and contributors and assigned in accordance with the Contributor roles in multiple author submissions policy.

English Studies at NBU (ESNBU) uses CASRAI's CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), a high-level taxonomy including 14 roles that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scientific scholarly output. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output.

The roles given in the taxonomy include, but are not limited to, traditional authorship roles. The roles are not intended to define what constitutes authorship, but instead to capture all the work that allows scholarly publications to be produced.

Each author must submit a separate Contributor roles document individually from their institutional email address.

Author identification and verification

ESNBU editors must be able to verify the authors' identity and affiliation. Therefore, all authors must have an ORCiD profile populated with publicly available data (affiliation at least). Additionally, use of institutional email addresses is required. Exceptions for independent scholars only.

Open Data

ESNBU requires authors to provide their research data as Open Data for their published articles. In such a way we enable and enact the FAIR Data Principles, which emphasize the need for findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of research data for both humans and machines.

Data that is integral to the paper must be made available in such a way as to enable readers to replicate, verify and build upon the conclusions published in the paper. Any restriction on the availability of this data must be disclosed at the time of submission. We recommend that data for which public repositories are widely used, and are accessible to all, should be deposited in such a repository prior to publication. The appropriate linking details and identifier(s) should then be included in the publication and, where possible, in the repository, to facilitate linking between the journal article and the data. If such a repository does not exist, data should be included as supporting information to the published paper or authors should agree to make their data available upon reasonable request.

License: Author selected but we recommend the following:

(For other compatible and incompatible licenses, see http://opendefinition.org/licenses)

Publication ethics

The editorial team subscribes to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) principles of publication ethics outlined in the Core Practices and is dedicated to following the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

Plagiarism statement

Every manuscript submitted for publication to ESNBU is checked for plagiarism, duplicate publication and text recycling after submission and before being sent for initial editor screening and double-blind peer review. We use Plagramme and Viper Plagiarism Scanner to detect plagiarism. We will investigate any allegations and act in accordance with the COPE guidelines.

Consequences of plagiarism
As a general rule, ESNBU will acknowledge plagiarism in an already published article and will consequently publish an apology when plagiarism has been proven. Inevitably, the plagiarist is identified in the published apology.

Malpractice Statement

English Studies at NBU is dedicated to following best practices on ethical matters, errors and retractions. The prevention of publication malpractice is one of the important responsibilities of the editorial board. Any kind of unethical behavior is not acceptable, and plagiarism in any form is not tolerated. By submitting articles to ESNBU authors affirm that manuscript contents are original. We will investigate any allegations and act in accordance with the COPE guidelines.
Read the ESNBU Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Corrections and Retractions

ESNBU will consider serious allegations and publishable amendments that affect the publication record and/or the scientific accuracy of published information. Four categories of amendments (corrections) are relevant for peer-reviewed material: Erratum or Publisher Correction, Corrigendum or Author Correction, Retraction or Addendum. All four correction types are bi-directionally linked to the original published paper and receive a DOI. Detailed information on the procedures and each amendment category are found in the Correction and Retraction Policy.
In all cases, we will follow the Committee on Publication Ethics Retraction Guidelines and flowcharts in our communications with all parties involved.

Peer review policy

All manuscripts are refereed, with research manuscripts being subject to a double-blind peer review process taking a maximum of four weeks. The double-blind review process ensures the anonymity of the reviewers and authors. Our peer reviewers are asked to follow the Peer Review Policy and the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers when handling papers for ESNBU.
Peer reviewers are credited through Publons. See the journal profile page

Conflict of interest

All authors, peer reviewers, and members of the editorial team must disclose any association that poses a Conflict of Interest in connection with manuscripts submitted to ESNBU. Our Conflict of Interest Policy applies to all material published in ESNBU including research articles, reviews, and commentaries.

Position Statement re: AI-assisted manuscripts and AI-generated text in manuscripts

We adopt the COPE position verbatim, whose guidelines we follow.

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.


Manuscripts that include text generated from AI/LLM shall only be considered if the produced text is presented as a part of the paper's experiment and/or experimental analysis. In case of non-disclosure of use of such tools, we will reject such manuscripts. Additionally, if a published paper is detected post-publication to have been generated or enhanced by LLM, we shall retract the said publication. Read the ESNBU Position Statement

Crossmark Policy Statement

CrossMark is a multi-publisher initiative to provide a standard way for readers to locate the authoritative version of an article or other published content. By applying the CrossMark logo, English Studies at NBU (ESNBU) is committing to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur.

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.

For more information on CrossMark, please visit the CrossMark site.

In order to maintain the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record, ESNBU follows current best practice in the scholarly publishing and library communities.

Privacy; GDPR

We collect personal data, but we respect the privacy and rights of our web site visitors too. Personal data will be processed based on Consent according to European Union law Art.6(1)(a) GDPR or as legitimate interest in accordance to Art.6(1)(f) of the GDPR.
Read our Privacy Statement and GDPR

Complaints Policy and Procedure

We are committed to providing a high-quality service. However, we acknowledge that sometimes we may not always achieve the standards to which we aspire. If something goes wrong, we would like to hear from you in order to ensure that we maintain a high standard of service at all times. We will deal with your complaint fairly, efficiently and effectively and where you have been adversely affected by a service that does not meet our standards, we promise to put it right.
Read our Complaints Policy and Procedure

Archiving

English Studies at NBU is archived in