Authors are invited to carefully read and follow these recommendations.

            The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to return research papers that are not submitted in accordance with these guidelines.

Article Evaluation Process

1. First Step: the article is examined confidentially by the journal’s reading committee, which meets regularly and intervenes at the pre-evaluation stage. It issues a decision on the eligibility of submissions before forwarding them to the associate editors.
   If the decision is negative, the article will be rejected on the platform, and the author will be informed of the reasons for rejection. The author may resubmit the article after taking the provided recommendations into account.
2. Second Step: If the article is deemed eligible for evaluation (Prepared in accordance with the journal template and submission guidelines), it will be sent in anonymized form to the relevant associate editor, who will forward it to two reviewers within their network.
   The reviewers will evaluate the paper according to a standardized evaluation form available on the ASJP platform.
3. Article Review Period: an evaluation period of 20 days is granted, but reviewers take a period extending to one month on average to send the evaluation results to the journal’s secretariat.
4. Article evaluation status: when the submitted article receives one positive opinion and another negative one, a third evaluation is requested from another reviewer, taking into account their origin, whether national or foreign.
5. Article preparation: to speed up the process of publishing articles in “Maalim Journal”, authors are invited to use the journal template; an author template is available in the “Instructions for Authors” section for submitting their articles.
6. Consulting the Author Guidelines file: by clicking on the “Author Guidelines” icon, a compressed file is downloaded; it serves as guidance for the author explaining how to submit the article. It also includes the journal’s copyright policy and contains a undertaking letter to be signed by the author, stating that the intellectual property belongs only to the journal.
7. Article submission: after preparing the article according to the downloaded journal template, and consulting the Author Guidelines, click on the “Submit Article” icon. A form will appear to be filled in, containing various information related to the article and the authors: article language, article title, abstract, keywords, full name of the author, affiliated institution, email (a second author can be added), suggested reviewers.

After filling in all the information and uploading the article file to the platform, click on the “Submit Article” icon located at the bottom of the information form.

8. Notification of article receipt: if the submission process is successful on the platform, a message will appear on the screen indicating this. At a later stage, the submitting author will receive on their personal email a notification of article submission, and the second author will receive a notification on their email to confirm their participation in the article.
9. Notification of article rejection: if it is found that the article does not comply with the journal template and publication requirements, the author will be notified of the rejection.
10. Tracking the article status on the platform: the author can log into his account on the platform and track the article status step by step by clicking on the “Articles” icon in his account. Then click on the “Submitted Articles” icon; a table will appear showing the article details such as: title, submission date, journal name, details, status… The latter goes through several stages:

• Stage 1: approval or rejection of peer review.
• Stage 2: Article awaiting evaluation.
• Stage 3: Assignment of the article to reviewers.
• Stage 4: Reviewers’ decision: approval, rejection, or request for revision.

11. Plagiarism policy: scientific theft, in all its forms, constitutes unethical behavior for the journal. Any violation of this rule will not be tolerated, and no further articles from an author found guilty of plagiarism will be accepted through the review process.
12. Reference entry process: once the author is notified of the article’s approval, they are required to enter the bibliographic references of their article according to the format specified on the platform, in order to complete the publication process in the journal.

To enter the bibliographic references, the author clicks on the “References” section, which opens another field “Add Reference.” By clicking on “New Reference,” the author can add the specified reference, whether it is a journal article, book, a PhD thesis, a memorandum, etc.

Afterwards, the author clicks on “Save,” and once all references have been entered, they click on “Finish.”

Submission of copyright transfer undertaking: publishing the article in the journal via the electronic platform is conditional upon the author submitting a signed copyright transfer undertaking (scanned PDF or image) using the template available in the “Author Guidelines” section, sent to the Editor-in-Chief via email: maalim.revue@gmail.com.