About the Journal

About the journal:

SJ Engineering Africa (SJ-Education) is an open-access international journal published by SJC Publishers Company LTD. The journal includes all disciplines of engineering research to narrow the knowledge gap in Africa. Our interest is studies from students from across the world who have done research projects in the area of engineering. Publishing with us will make your research findings available online as soon as the publication is made. We promise high review quality and international visibility of your research findings.

Open Access policy:

SJ Engineering Africa is committed to information sharing and transparency. Our policies help authors achieve a high level of openness with their research and support them to improve the quality of the work they do. We have adopted an Open Access policy that enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research. Our Open Access policy contains the following elements:

1. Publications are discoverable and accessible online. Publications will be deposited in a specified repository(s) with proper tagging of metadata.

2. The publication will be On “Open Access” terms. Licensing policy Student’s journals publish under the Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 international (CCBY-NC-ND 4.0) license which allows you to Share, Copy, and redistribute the materials in any medium or format. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms;

  • Attribution: You must give appropriate credit, 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.
  • Non-commercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Commercial use is one primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation.
  • No Derivatives: if you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
  • No additional restrictions: You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Peer review process and timeline:

SJ Engineering Africa's process of peer review involves an exchange between a journal editor and a team of reviewers. After the referees receive a paper from the editor, they read it closely and provide individual critiques, usually within two to four weeks. In their critiques, they:

  • Comment on the validity of the science, identifying scientific errors, and evaluating the design and methodology used.
  • Judge the significance by evaluating the importance of the findings.
  • Determine the originality of the work based on how much it advances the field. Reviewers also identify missing or inaccurate references.
  • Recommend that the paper be published or rejected.

3. Publications will be accessible and open immediately. All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period. An embargo period is a period during which the publisher will require a subscription or the payment of a fee to gain access to the publication.

Editorial process and timeline:

After a paper is submitted to the journal, an immediate response is provided acknowledging the reception of the paper in not more than 1hr from the time of submission. The editor-in-chief assigns the paper to the relevant Editor of the section in the Journal. The journal editor then screens the manuscript and decides whether or not to send it for full peer review. Only after clearing the initial screening can the manuscript be sent to one or more peer reviewers. Finally, journal editors consider the peer reviewers’ reports and make the final decision to accept or reject the manuscript for publication. During the initial screening, journal editors mainly check the following: Editors go through the abstract and may even skim through the introduction, figures, tables, or other sections of the paper to determine whether the manuscript passes the SJ Engineering Africa Quality threshold. Peer review A minimum of 2 peer reviewers (up to 3) are chosen for the peer review. SJ Engineering Africa built a pool of peer reviewers who have a good track record of producing high-quality reviews. These have sufficient subject matter expertise to do justice to the manuscript and usually provide feedback in a period, of not more than 4 weeks. Highly technical papers or papers from niche subject areas may take longer to review (about 2 months), because it may take editors some time to locate appropriate reviewers from academic platforms in Africa. The peer review is completed once all the reviewers send the journal a detailed report with their comments on the manuscript and their recommendations. The double-blind peer review system Double-blind review, in which the identities of the author and Editors are both hidden, makes it easier for reviewers to focus on the paper itself without being swayed by any preconceived ideas about the author or their institution. Final decision The journal editor considers the feedback provided by the peer reviewers and arrives at a decision. The following are the most common decisions that are made;

  • Accept without any changes (acceptance): The journal will publish the paper in its original form
  • Accept with minor revisions (acceptance): The journal will publish the paper and ask the author to make small corrections
  • Accept after major revisions (conditional acceptance) The journal will publish the paper provided the authors make the changes suggested by the reviewers and/or editors
  • Revise and resubmit (conditional rejection): The journal is willing to reconsider the paper in another round of decision-making after the authors make major changes Reject the paper (outright rejection): The journal will not publish the paper or reconsider it even if the authors make major revisions.

Once approved, articles undergo proofreading, copy-editing, and typesetting processes. 1. Editors identify what works, and what doesn’t and evaluate a manuscript’s potential. 2. Editors help the author make the manuscript better through revision guidance. 3. Editors polish the writing and make it read as well as possible. 4. Editors make sure the copy is correct and ready for publication. Publication of approved papers: SJ Engineering Africa publishes articles every quarter. A complete issue is usually made up of 5-300 articles.

Preservation and Archiving policy:

SJ Engineering Africa uses the CLOCKSS and LOCKSS systems allowing libraries to collect, preserve, and provide our readers with access to material published on our Website. Our main goal is digital preservation.

Repository Policy:

SJ Engineering Africa allows authors the use the published version of an article for self-archiving on either the author's website or archiving in a University repository. This can be done as soon as after publication without any embargo period. The published source must be acknowledged and a link to the journal home page or articles' DOI must be set.

Journal Charges:

Being an open-access journal, we do not charge fees to publish or access content published by the journal. This is so because we believe that to promote research freedom among African Students, Publications should not be influenced by the author's ability to pay. The journal can facilitate its editorial process through donations, and the manuscript handling fee of 146,000UgX, (40 US dollars).

Waiver policy:

We understand that most African students may have limited funding for their research activities. Thus, we have instituted a generous waiver system that may ease the payment of the manuscript handling fee when they choose to publish their manuscripts in our journal. Because our editorial decisions are never influenced by the author’s ability to pay, we ensure that editors are not involved in correspondence with authors regarding payment of manuscript handling fees. The automatic waiver system will be managed by administrative staff not involved in decisions regarding article acceptance. We ask authors not to discuss any issues concerning payment with editors since it will not help. The authors from the following countries may be granted up to 100% waiver if the application is successful, 1. Angola 2. Benin 3. Botswana 4. Algeria 5. Burkina Faso 6. Burundi 7. Cameroon 8. Cape Verde 9. The Central African Republic 10. Chad 11. Comoros 12. The Democratic Republic of the Congo 13. Republic of the Congo 14. Djibouti 15. Egypt 16. Equatorial Guinea 17. Eritrea 18. Ethiopia 19. Gabon 20. The Gambia 21. Ghana 22. Guinea 23. Guinea-Bissau 24. Ivory Coast 25. Kenya 26. Lesotho 27. Liberia 28. Libya 29. Madagascar 30. Malawi 31. Mali 32. Mauritania 33. Mauritius 34. Morocco 35. Mozambique 36. Namibia 37. Niger 38. Nigeria 39. Rwanda 40. Sao Tome and Principe 41. Senegal 42. Seychelles 43. Sierra Leone 44. Somalia 45. South Africa 46. South Sudan 47. Sudan 48. Swaziland 49. Tanzania 50. Togo 51. Tunisia 52. Uganda 53. Zambia 54. Zimbabwe Membership: Our electronic journals offer unrestricted, unlimited, free access to any reader, with no subscription or registration required. Our members support the project through the payment of annual membership fees, allowing them to submit an unlimited number of manuscripts for consideration. All manuscripts undergo a meticulous and stringent double-blind peer review process, and only manuscripts deemed of sufficient quality and relevance will be accepted for publication. For each journal, we aim to publish the most relevant research and to guarantee the highest visibility of all articles by including our contents in the most important academic indexing and abstracting databases.

SJ Engineering Africa Institutional Membership:

Institutions interested in supporting open access and increasing the proportion of their publications available to the broad public are welcome to join SJ Engineering Africa's institutional membership. The institutional membership benefits all affiliated researchers with the possibility of unlimited submission and can be pursued by an annual flat fee based on the number of students and staff of the institution who choose to publish with us. For a membership quote please contact us at membership@sjhresearchafrica.org Why become a member? • You are supporting a not-for-profit, open-access organization • No further costs or processing charges are required. • Complete access to the up-to-date status of each manuscript submitted • Authors retain the copyrights of their published work

Benefits of our membership:

• Unlimited sharing of knowledge among the academic community is assured. • Students get to work directly with our expert editors at all stages of the research project development. • Demonstrate our professionalism with guidance and resources • Widen your network and share your ideas with our community • Students access academic content and information to build knowledge and expertise • A journal correspondent is assigned to the research office to assist in promoting good research. • Capacity building at the selected departments.

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES:

These online publications may not match identically with the information contained in the print versions, and to the extent that such differences exist the online editions of all journals officially published by the SJC Publishers Company LTD are the versions of the record. These publications are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Descriptions of, or references to, products or publications do not imply endorsement of that product or publication. In no event shall SJC Publishers Company LTD be liable for any special, incidental, indirect, or consequential damages of any kind arising out of or in connection with the use of the articles or other material derived from these journals, whether or not advised of the possibility of damage, and on any theory of liability. SJC Publishers Company LTD is under development, and changes may be made to these publications and programs at any time. All advertising appearing in the SJC Publishers Company LTD is the sole responsibility of the advertiser. SJC Publishers Company LTD does not endorse or warrant any product advertised or any statements made in any advertisements.

Company’s Terms and Conditions/Refund/Cancellation Policy:

Refundable items The Journal only publishes scholarly materials for an international readership. It does not have any other items it deals with indirectly. The refund/Cancellation process The SJC Publishers Company LTD billing office will only invoice an author who has successfully met the set standards for the journal and has responded to all comments from the peer-review stages to the expectations of the peer-reviewers and section editors where the article will be published. Once the author makes payment and later wishes to withdraw his/ her scholarly material before the publication date, they should bring this to the attention of the Journal editor 30 days before the publication date on editor@sjhresearchafrica.org. Once a request to withdraw an article is received, the journal editor will examine the application and recommend a refund to the author in a period not exceeding 3 months from the period the approval is provided. Typically, the money will be refunded back onto the credit or debit card the customer paid with.

Author guidelines:

All journals published by SJC Publishers Company LTD have the same author guidelines as discussed below. The journal paper should follow the accepted layout. The complete paper should have a total of 22 components as listed below.

  • 1) Topic
  • 2) Authors and Affiliation
  • 3) Email + Telephone number
  • 4) Abstract
  • 5) Background
  • 6) Methodology
  • 7) Results
  • 8) Conclusion
  • 9) Recommendation
  • 10) keywords
  • 11) Background of study
  • 12) Methodology
  • 13) Results
  • 14) Discussion
  • 15) Conclusion
  • 16) Recommendation
  • 17) Acknowledgement
  • 18) List of Abbreviations
  • 19) Source of funding
  • 20) Conflict of interest
  • 21) Author Biography
  • 22) References

Please list all authors who played a significant role in developing the points in the article. Please: 1. Provide full affiliation information (full institutional address and e-mail address) for all authors, and 2. Indicate who is/are the corresponding author(s). Criteria for authorship are based on the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to the journal. Being an author implies full responsibility for the article’s content and that the work conforms to our editorial policies. For large, multi-center collaborations, the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript must be listed as authors. Details of each author’s contribution must be listed in the Author Contributions section. Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. The involvement of any professional medical writer assistant must be declared. Title Please provide a concise and specific title that reflects the content of the article. Abstract Abstracts should be up to 300 words long and provide a succinct summary of the article. Although the abstract should explain why the article might be interesting, the importance of the work should not be over-emphasized. Citations should not be used in the abstract. Abbreviations, if needed, should be spelled out. Keywords Authors should supply up to eight relevant keywords that describe the subject of their article. These will improve the visibility of your article. Main Body The format of the main body of the article is flexible: it should be concise, making it easy to read and review, and presented in a format that is appropriate for the type of study presented. For most Research Articles, the following standard format will be the most appropriate: • Introduction • Methods • Results • Conclusions/Discussion Standards of reporting: Standards of reporting guidelines help authors to ensure that they have provided a comprehensive description of their research, making it easier for others to assess and reproduce the work. Articles Submitted that report clinical trials must adhere to the CONSORT reporting guidelines. We ask authors to include a copy of the original trial protocol and a completed CONSORT checklist and flow diagram as supporting files, which will be published alongside the article. The trial registration number and registration date must be included in the Methods section. Any deviation from the original trial protocol must be explained in the article.

Reproducibility:

SJC Publishers Company LTD is committed to serving the research community by ensuring that all articles include sufficient information to allow others to reproduce the work. With this in mind, the Methods sections should provide sufficient details of the materials and methods used so that the work can be repeated by others. The section should also include a brief discussion of allowances made (if any) for controlling bias or unwanted sources of variability. Any limitations of the datasets should be discussed.

Ethics policies:

All research must have been conducted within an appropriate ethical framework. For studies involving humans or animals, details of approval by the author’s institution or an ethics committee must be provided in the Methods section. Please refer to the detailed ‘Ethics’ section in our editorial policies for more information. Data (and Software) Availability Underlying data All articles must include a Data Availability Statement, even where there is no data associated with the article. If you are describing new software, please make the source code available on a Version Control System (VCS) such as GitHub, BitBucket, or SourceForge, and provide details of the repository and the license under which the software can be used in the article. Reporting Guidelines Articles in SJHR-Africa must comply with consensus-based minimum reporting guidelines for research. Checklists are available for several reporting guidelines, including: • Randomized controlled trials (CONSORT) and protocols (SPIRIT) • Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) and protocols (PRISMA-P) • Observational studies (STROBE) • Case reports (CARE) • Qualitative research (COREQ; SRQR) Consent: For articles involving participants authors must ensure that they have written informed consent from all the subjects involved (or their legal guardian for a minor, or next of kin if the participant is deceased). Please be ready to provide copies of such consent forms, if requested by the SJC Publishers Company LTD Ethics team. Author Contributions We are using the CRediT Taxonomy to capture author contributions as we believe that having more detail of who did what brings transparency, enables recognition for researchers, and provides greater accountability for all involved. You do not need to include an Author Contributions section in your manuscript: on submission, you will be asked for the contributions made by each author, to be selected from the list below. Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. Grant Information Please state who funded the work, whether it is your employer, a grant funder, etc. Please do not list funding that you have that is not relevant to this specific piece of research. For each funder, please state the funder’s name, the grant number where applicable, and the individual to whom the grant was assigned. If your work was not funded by any grants, please include the section entitled “Grant information” and state: ‘The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work. Acknowledgments This section should acknowledge anyone who contributed to the research or the writing of the article but who does not qualify as an author; please clearly state how they contributed. The authors should obtain permission to include the name and affiliations, of all those mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. Please note that grant funding should not be listed here. Supplementary Material To ensure all materials associated with a manuscript are visible, FAIR, and subject to peer review, SJ Biomedical Engineering Africa does not accept supplementary material. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, or supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data. Extended data should be deposited in an approved repository and listed as part of the data availability statement. References can be listed in any standard referencing style as long as it is consistent between references within a given article. However, the basic requirements include: • Journal abbreviations should follow the Index Medicus/MEDLINE abbreviation approach. • Preprints can be cited and listed in the reference list. • Only articles, books book chapters, datasets, and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers/data repositories, may be cited. Unpublished abstracts, papers that have been submitted to a journal but not yet accepted, and personal communications should instead be included in the text; they should be referred to as ‘personal communications’ or ‘unpublished reports’ and the researchers involved should be named. The authors are responsible for getting permission to quote any personal communications from the cited individuals. • Weblinks, URLs, and links to the authors’ websites should be included as hyperlinks within the main body of the article, and not as references. • References to trials on a clinical trial database should be as follows: [Authors/name of group], [title of the trial], In ClinicalTrials.gov [cited year month date], Available from [URL of the link from ClinicalTrials.gov]. • Datasets published or deposited elsewhere (for example, in Dryad, etc.) should be listed in the "References" section and the citation to the dataset should follow one of these examples. Figures and Tables: All figures and tables should be cited and discussed in the article text. These should fit on one page. Figure legends and tables should be added at the end of the manuscript. Tables should be formatted using the ‘insert table’ function in Word or provided as an Excel file. For larger tables or spreadsheets of data, please see our data guidelines. Files for figures are usually best uploaded as separate files through the submission system (see below for information on formats). Any photographs must be accompanied by written consent to publish from the individuals involved. Any distinguishing features, including medical record numbers or codes in the case of clinical images that could be used to identify the patient or participant concerned, must be removed from the images. Titles and legends: Each figure or table should have a concise title of no more than 15 words. A legend for each figure and table should also be provided that briefly describes the key points and explains any symbols and abbreviations used. The legend should be sufficiently detailed so that the figure or table can stand alone from the main text. Permissions: If reusing a figure or table from a previous publication, the authors are responsible for obtaining permission from the copyright holder and for the payment of any fees (if applicable). Please include a note in the legend to state that: ‘This figure/table has been reproduced with permission from [include original publication citation]’. Figure formats: For all figures, the color mode should be RGB or grayscale. Line art: Examples of line art include graphs, diagrams, flow charts, and phylogenetic trees. Please make sure that text is at least 8pt, the lines are thick enough to be seen at the size the image will likely be displayed (between 75-150 mm width, which converts to one or two columns width, respectively), and that the font size and type are consistent between images. Figures should be created using a white background to ensure that they display correctly online. If you submit a graph, please export the graph as an EPS file using the program you used to create the graph (e.g. SPSS). If this is not possible, please send us the original file in which the graph was created (e.g. if you created the graph in Excel, send us the Excel file with the embedded graph). If you submit other forms of line art such as flow charts, diagrams or text to be displayed as an image, please export the image as an EPS file (e.g. if creating phylogenetic trees with specialized programs), or send us the original file that was used to create the image (e.g. EPS or AI files if Adobe Illustrator was used, or a DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX or equivalent file if Word or PowerPoint was used). If none of the above options is possible then we also accept uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 600dpi at the size, they are likely to be displayed at (see above). Images (if applicable) Photographs and microscopy images: Photographs and microscopy images should be submitted as uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 300 at the size they are likely to be displayed (see above). Mixed images: Images that are a mix of half-tone images and line art (e.g. annotated gels or images with scale bars) should be submitted as TIFF files at a resolution of 500 or vector files (e.g. EPS or Adobe Illustrator files). Please ensure that the text size is at least 8pt and lines are thick enough to be visible at the size the image will be displayed. Images to be used as data: If you are submitting photographic images as part of your raw dataset, please submit them as uncompressed TIFF files. Electronic manipulation of images: The clarity of figures may be improved using image-editing software, but this must be done transparently and without misrepresenting the data (and the original, unaltered source data must be provided with the article). Brightness, contrasts, or color balance may be used to enhance electronic images, but such changes must be applied to the whole image; any non-linear adjustments must be made explicit in the figure legend. Specific features within an image must not be added or changed (e.g. amplified, removed, or obscured); and if figures are composed of images that have come from different sources, such as different gels, or different parts of the same source, this must be made clear on the figure (e.g. by adding dividing lines). Authors are required to include details of all modifications made to images published as figures or uploaded as data in the Methods section of an article, including the name of the software (with version number) used to make these modifications.

The policy of screening for plagiarism.

Plagiarism is scientific misconduct and should be addressed as such. “Plagiarism is the use of others' published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source. The intent and effect of plagiarism are to mislead the reader as to the contributions of the plagiarizer. This applies to whether the ideas or words are taken from abstracts, research grant applications, Institutional Review Board applications, or unpublished or published manuscripts in any publication format. Self-plagiarism refers to the practice of an author using portions of their previous writings on the same topic in another of their publications, without specifically citing it formally in quotes. This practice is widespread and sometimes unintentional, as there are only so many ways to say the same thing on many occasions, particularly when writing the methods section of an article. Direct plagiarism is the plagiarism of the text. Mosaic plagiarism is the borrowing of ideas and opinions from a source and a few verbatim words or phrases without crediting the author. Papers submitted will be screened for plagiarism using iThenticate and AntiplagiatRU plagiarism detection tools. SJHR-Africa will immediately reject papers leading to plagiarism or self-plagiarism. Before submitting articles to reviewers, those are first checked for similarity/plagiarism tools, by a member of the editorial team. The papers submitted must have a similarity level of less than 10 %. Similarity per each detected reference also must be a maximum of 1 %. Note: All authors are suggested to use plagiarism detection software to do the similarity checking before submitting their manuscript to the journal. Authors can adhere to the following steps to report plagiarism: 1. Inform the editor of the journal where a plagiarized article is published. 2. Send original and plagiarized articles with plagiarized parts highlighted. 3. If evidence of plagiarism is convincing, the editor should arrange for a disciplinary meeting. 4. The editor of the journal where the plagiarized article should communicate with the editor of the journal containing the original article to rectify the matter. 5. The plagiarist should be asked to explain. 6. In the case of nonresponse in the stipulated time or an unsatisfactory explanation, the article should be permanently retracted. 7. The author should be blacklisted and debarred for submitting an article to a particular journal for at least 5 years. 8. The concerned head of the institution from which work is sent has to be notified. The author bears the responsibility for checking whether the material submitted is subject to copyright or ownership rights, e.g. figures, tables, photographs, illustrations, trade literature, and data. The author will need to obtain permission to reproduce any such items and include these permissions with their final submission. Where use is so restricted, the editorial office and Publisher must be informed of the final submission of the material. Please add any necessary acknowledgments to the typescript, preferably in the form of an Acknowledgments section at the end of the paper. Credit the source and copyright of photographs, figures, illustrations, etc. in the supplementary captions. Note: Any case of plagiarism should be immediately reported to; plagiarism@sjhresearchafrica.org

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