Substantia. An International Journal of the History of Chemistry

Substantia is an open access peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to traditional perspectives as well as innovative and synergetic implications in all fields of Chemistry, from current research to historical studies. It is meant to be a crucible for discussions on science, on making science and its outcomes. 

Recently the Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB) approved our application for indexing Substantia in Scopus.

Scopus is used by more than 5,000 academic, government and corporate institutions, including top rankings organizations.

“We are pleased to see such excellent progress of our journal this year” said Prof. Pierandrea Lo Nostro, editor in chief of Substantia “It is a tribute to the achievements and contributions of our authors, editors and scientific boards. The improvement reflects our ongoing commitment to promote the highest quality content and dissemination in all fields of Chemistry, from current research to historical studies. We are sincerely grateful to the peer reviewers who put in countless hours to help maintain the outstanding quality of our articles”.

FUP and Substantia teams are proud of this result and wish to share this announcement with the readers, editors and reviewers of the journal. With their contributions we achieved this remarkable goal.

Focus and Scope

Besides its main focus on the dissemination of advances in Chemistry, Substantia welcomes contributions dealing with other experimental or theoretical scientific disciplines, and other horizons of human culture, including society, education, ethics, etc.

We are interested in:

• original contributions offering novel experimental or theoretical insights in Chemistry and related disciplines
• fundamentals implications of chemical theories and related sciences
• the progress of single discoveries, the life of scientists, the historical advancement of technology, in other words, the stories of the people behind breakthroughs and innovations
• the historical overview and critical reviews of chemical theories and their interweaving with the cultural and social environment
• the critical discussion of past concepts and experimental works, in the light of the present chemical knowledge
• contributions on contemporary science reporting and scientific dissemination
• discussions on making science and on the role and efforts of basic research in a world where the practical and financial outcomes seem to be the main driving forces.

Substantia is also the right place for the publication of scarcely accessible literature milestones and of unpublished material. We welcome papers that report the story of a discovery, where the intellectual and experimental steps that precede the writing are presented.

External Rigorous Peer-Review

Each submission to Substantia is subject to a rigorous quality control and external peer-review evaluation process before receiving a final decision. The initial in-house quality control check deals with issues such as competing interests; ethical requirements for studies involving human participants or animals; financial disclosures; full compliance with Substantia’s data availability policy, etc. 
If the manuscript is considered suitable for publication, it is sent to at least two external anonymous reviewers. The peer review can be single or double-blind. If the reviews are positive, but the manuscript requires to be revised and resubmitted, the author is expected to submit the revised version.

The Editors are responsible for conducting the peer-review process and for the final decision on the submitted article.

Open Access Policy

Substantia provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, Firenze University Press at the University of Florence, complies with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access: By “open access”, we mean the free availability on the public internet, the permission for all users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the 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 guarantee the original authors with control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. We support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in our journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0). Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their websites prior to and during the submission process and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication without embargo. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

Publication Frequency

Papers will be published online as "Just Accepted" whithin 48 hours after acceptance, and tagged with a DOI code. The final full bibliographic record for each article (initial-final page) will be available in concomitance with the issue publication. Substantia publishes 2 regular issues per year (March and September). Manuscripts are accepted at any time through the online submission system. 

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with Substantia agree to the following terms:

• Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY-4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in Substantia.
• Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
• Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Publication Fees

Unlike many open-access journals, Substantia does not charge any publication fee.

Waiver Information

Fee waivers do not apply at Firenze University Press because our funding does not rely on author charges. 

Publication Ethics

Responsibilities of Substantia's editors, reviewers, and authors concerning publication ethics and publication malpractice are described in Substantia’s Guidelines on Publication Ethics.   

Corrections and Retractions

In accordance with the generally accepted standards of scholarly publishing, Substantia does not alter articles after publication: "Articles that have been published should remain extant, exact and unaltered to the maximum extent possible".
In cases of serious errors or (suspected) misconduct Substantia publishes corrections and retractions (expressions of concern).

Reversion of rights

Articles may sometimes be accepted for publication but later rejected in the publication process, even in some cases after public posting in "Just Accepted" form, in which case all rights will revert to the author.

Archiving

Substantia and Firenze University Press are experimenting a National legal deposition and long-term digital preservation service.