ABOUT JOURNAL
The E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies (ERATS)-ISSN 2458-7338 is an international open-access journal. ERATS publishes academic articles, conference papers, dissertation/thesis chapters and book reviews in the field of Religious and Theological Studies. ERATS came into being in September 2015 at the Department of Religious Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi-Ghana when Rev. Prof. Jonathan Kuwornu-Adjaottor won the William Shakespeare Research Award-2015 in Religious Studies. He teamed up with Professor Sorrie Conteh – Ernest Bai Koroma University of Science and Technology – Magburuka, Sierra Leone (previously at the Biblical Studies Department of the All Nations University College, Koforidua-Ghana) in starting the journal. The Journal was initially published two to three times annually. The Journal is currently published online monthly by Noyam Journals – Accra, Ghana – West Africa. View all Issues
ERATS is peer-reviewed and operates an open access policy aimed at Advancing Religous and Theological Studies throughout Africa. ERATS focuses on theoretical and empirical research in Religious and Theological studies. The journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts with the theoretical or empirical aspects from the following categories: African Traditional Religion, Biblical Interpretation, Biblical Translation Studies, Christian Education, Church History, Church and Society, Comparative Study of Religions, Ecocriticism, Ethics, History and Mission, Inter-religious Dialogue, New Testament, Old Testament, Pentecostal Studies, Theology, Wisdom Literature. We however accept manuscripts relating to other areas not stated above pertaining to religious and theological research.
All articles submitted to this journal are subjected to a peer-review process. The double-blind review process takes about 4 to 9 weeks. Authors would be notified at each stage of the review process.
Outline of the Peer Review process
- Each submitted paper goes through an initial plagiarism check using the CrossRef’s Similarity Check software powered by iThenticate’s Turnitin. Articles that contain plagiarised content of other published articles would be rejected.
- Articles that pass the plagiarism check go through a blind pre-review process assessing its quality, accuracy, references (up-to-date, appropriate, sufficient), punctuation, spelling and grammar.
- Manuscripts that do not pass the initial blind pre-review stage are sent back to their respective authors to make amends and re-submit where appropriate or rejected.
- If a paper passes a pre-review stage, the Editorial Board assigns it to a reviewer with expertise relating to the scope of the submitted manuscript for a blind review.
- During the blind review process, a reviewer assesses a submitted manuscript, assigns marks and makes comments based on the categories listed below: Originality and creativity; Interest of the topic to the readers; Significance/usefulness; Mastery over subject; contribution to knowledge; Accuracy (Methodology); Comprehensiveness; Punctuation; Spelling and Grammar; References (up-to-date, appropriate, sufficient); Tables, Charts and Captions.
- The Reviewer outlines the strengths, weaknesses and other comments to be considered by an author in a review report, provides an overall score and recommends one of the following: Publish as it is, Publish upon minor revisions, Publish upon major revisions or Reject.
- Once the final report from a reviewer is sent to the Editorial Team, a final decision is made about the manuscript and sent to the author.
- Authors of manuscripts that are accepted are expected to make the necessary corrections where appropriate and submit the following: A copy of the revised manuscript and a word document outlining point-by-point the corrections they have made according to the reviewer’s comments.
All research papers published in ERATS are open access. This means that they are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication for free download on the journal website. With open access, authors can easily share the content of their research work with a much wider audience, the global research community can have access to all articles, there is no need to have any kind of membership or pay any fees in order to use, or download published journal articles. Any user can read, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. The copyright holder – author(s) of all published articles grants usage rights to others using an open license (CC BY license).
All Research articles in this journal are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Author(s) will retain the copyright of their published articles agreeing that the CC BY license terms will be applied to their work. Under the terms of this license, no permission is required from the author(s) or publisher for members of the research community to copy, distribute, transmit or adapt the article content.
Views, opinions and conclusions expressed in the research article are views, opinions and conclusions of the author(s). The Journal shall not accept responsibility or be answerable for any loss, damage or liability caused in relation to conflicts of interest, copyright violations and inappropriate or inaccurate use of any kind content related or integrated into published research articles.
Noyam uses CrossRef’s Similarity Check powered by iThenticate to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism. From Friday, 29th May 2020 all submitted journal articles would be subjected to a plagiarism check before commencing the editorial review process. Noyam considers plagiarism a serious offense. We are therefore committed to eliminating manuscripts with possible cases of plagiarism from the review and publication process.
All articles published articles receive a DOI issued by Crossref and are permanently published. Authors can revise, change and update their articles by publishing new versions, which are added to the article’s history. The web URLs, abstracts and references of published articles are deposited with Crossref allowing citation linking to the work. This only applies to all articles published after May, 2020. Noyam participates in the CrossMark scheme, a multi-publisher initiative that has developed a standard way for readers to locate the current version of an article. By applying the CrossMark policies, Noyam is committed to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur. The CrossMark logo will appear on the title page of every published article pdf and web page.
If a correction has been made to a published article this will be noted in the CrossMark information. View the Noyam Publishers participation Reports on CrossRef.
Digital Archiving – Noyam is committed to the long-term preservation of all its published content. From October 2020, all published journal articles in Noyam would be digitally archived with Portico. Portico is a digital preservation service provided by ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.
It is important for Authors to note that their published articles are not ‘final’ as new versions can be added at any stage. Possible mistakes that come to light during the peer review process may be highlighted in the published peer review reports, which are part of the article. Authors can publish revised versions, and any errors that become apparent during peer review or later can be corrected through the publication of new versions.
Articles may be retracted for several reasons, including honest errors reported by the authors, research misconduct (data fabrication), duplicate or overlapping publication, fraudulent use of data, clear plagiarism, unethical research. For any retracted article, the reason for retraction and who is instigating the retraction will be clearly stated in the Retraction notice. The retraction notice will be linked to the retracted article (which usually remains on the site) and the article will be clearly marked as retracted (including the PDF). An article is usually only retracted at the authors’ request or by the publisher in response to an institutional investigation. The content of a retracted article would only be removed where legal limitations have been placed upon the publisher, copyright holder or author(s).
This Journal operates an open access policy and does not charge subscription or access fees. Upon full acceptance of a submitted manuscript for publication, authors are required to contribute to the costs incurred during the publication process. There are however no charges for paper submissions and papers that are rejected during the review process. There are no other processing fees; the editing, the DOI, the publication and online hosting are all covered by the APC. The APC remains the same no matter how many pages, authors, graphic content, etc. your article may have. Upon acceptance of your manuscript, we would provide you with further directions on our accepted modes of payment. Authors from Ghana are required to pay GH₵ 400, Authors from other African countries are required to pay GH₵ 460 / USD 80 and Authors from countries outside Africa are required to pay GH₵ 580 / USD 100. Authors should please note that a 20% discount waiver has been applied to the APC’s charged for authors from Ghana and other African countries. Authors from other developing countries having challenges with payment of APC’s should inform the Journal Administration for consideration.
Journal Administration – Naa Kai Amanor-Mfoafo
Email: publications@noyam.org/ naakaiam@noyam.org