The journal publishes three issues per year. Manuscripts should be submitted only by one of the authors. Submissions by anyone other than one of authors will not be accepted. Only Word (.doc, .docx) files may be submitted. There is no page limit. Only e-mail submissions are accepted to facilitate rapid publication and minimize administrative costs. The submitting author takes responsibility for the paper during submission and peer review.

In order to encourage young scientists, IJBE Journal is an “open type” free-access journal without publication fees neither for authors nor for readers. The high quality of papers is ensured by a very strict peer-reviewing of all submitted articles. The Journal is edited by the HSBS Society. The International Journal of Bridge Engineering (IJBE) will publish research articles that advance the practice and profession of bridge engineering – soil-bridge interaction and papers about Aesthetics and architecture of bridges, Bridge monitoring, Design methods, Fabrication and construction, New and high performance materials, Seismic behavior, Vehicle-bridge interaction, Old bridges and maintenance, Stone bridges, Wooden bridges, Floating bridges, Long-span bridges, Geotechnical problems related to bridges, Soil-structure interaction, Computational techniques, Experimental research, Isolation and damping systems, Aeroelasticity problems in bridges, Impact and Explosion problems.

The work must demonstrate in a clear and concise manner main results obtained, their novelty and importance, while conclusions must be justified by the study. As mentioned above, there are three categories of contributions to the IJBE. Except of the Short Communications, there are no strict length restrictions for the overall manuscript or individual sections. Regardless of the category, all submitted manuscripts should have a short abstract (typically containing fewer than 250 words) and 5-6 keywords. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the readership of the IJBE, the authors should emphasize the importance of their results to researchers in other fields of engineering structures, whenever applicable. The papers that may have potential implications across several fields of research in bridge engineering and/or soil-bridge interaction are especially welcome. Full Research Articles present new results that are either of current general interest or of great significance to a more specialized audience. There are no restrictions on the length of full research articles. The work should be put in the context of the current state-of-the-art in the field, implying that a comprehensive review of relevant literature is required in the introductory part. The manuscript in this category should be divided into sections, with sections containing Introduction, Main Results, Conclusions, and References necessarily present.

Once the manuscript is accepted for publication, authors have to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement that is available on the webpage of the IJBE. We encourage submitting the signed agreement electronically (scanned) at the time of the manuscript submission. A completed agreement, signed by the corresponding author on behalf of all the authors, must be provided for each submitted manuscript as a condition of publication.

Each manuscript should be accompanied by a cover letter which should explicitly state that the authors have the authority to publish the work and that the manuscript (or one with substantially the same content, by any of the authors) has not been previously published, electronically or in print, in any language anywhere and that it is not under simultaneous consideration by another journal. Submission of a manuscript to this journal implies that any experimental research that is reported in the manuscript has been performed with the approval of an appropriate ethics committee. All authors of the manuscript are responsible for its content; they must have agreed to its publication and have given the corresponding author the authority to act on their behalf in all matters pertaining to publication. The corresponding author is responsible for informing the co-authors of the manuscript status throughout the submission, review, and production process. The cover letter should also contain suggestions of at least three proposed reviewers with their contact details, affiliations, and email addresses. The final suggestion of reviewers is the decision of the Editor or an Editorial Board member handling the manuscript.

It is authors' responsibility to obtain written copyright permissions to reproduce any copyright materials from other sources, if they are required (e.g. for a review article). Authors are advised to cite proper references in figure/tables captions of all previously published figures/tables/illustrations including their own published work and obtain copyright permissions from appropriate publishers and authors.

Both submissions and the peer review process are handled the IJBE Editorial Team. Each manuscript submitted to the Editor receives an individual identification code that is used in any correspondence with regard to the publication process. During the pre-screen process, a submission may be declined without review if the studies reported are not sufficiently novel or important to merit publication in the journal. The Editor seeks advice from experts in the appropriate field and appoints an Editorial Board member with expertise in that field, who is fully responsible for further handling the manuscript and an ultimate decision about its acceptance/rejection. All articles submitted to the IJBE that pass the initial pre-screen process, are refereed by a minimum of two reviewers. Each reviewer evaluates the manuscript and completes a Review Form regarding Recommendation: (i) accept without revision, (ii) minor revision, (iii) major revision, (iv) change to Technical Note and (v) reject, Grade of the Contribution: excellent, significant, marginal, non-significant and trivial, Grade of the Content and Presentation, as well as other specific comments. Once all reviews have been received and considered, a decision letter is sent by IJBE to the author regarding acceptance or not of the paper. Rejection of the manuscript does not necessarily imply that the paper is incorrect, uninteresting, or unimportant in general. It implies that the authors have not established to the satisfaction of the referees that the paper has sufficient merits according to the standards of the IJBE.

Scientific misconduct is defined as "fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research". In cases where there is a suspicion or allegation of scientific misconduct or fraudulent research in manuscripts submitted or published, the Editors reserve the right to impose sanctions on the authors, such as:

• an immediate rejection of the manuscript;

• banning author(s) from submitting manuscripts to the journal for a certain period of time;

• retracting the manuscript;

• alerting editors of other journals and publishers;

• bringing the concerns to the authors' sponsoring or funding institution or other appropriate authority for investigation.

The IJBE publishes only original manuscripts that are not also published or going to be published elsewhere. Multiple submissions/publications, or redundant publications (re-packaging in different words of data already published by the same authors) will be rejected. If they are detected only after publication, the journal reserves the right to publish a Retraction Note. Conflicts of Interest Disclosure. In order to encourage transparency without impeding publication, all authors, referees and editors must declare any association that poses a conflict of interest in connection with the manuscript. There should be no contractual relations or proprietary considerations that would affect the publication of information contained in a submitted manuscript. A competing interest for a scholarly journal is anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, review, or publication of research findings, or of articles that comment on or review research findings. Potential conflicts of interest exist when an author, editor or reviewer has financial, personal or professional interests in a publication that might influence their scientific judgment. Although the editors attempt to avoid conflicts of interests in their choice of referees, they may not always be aware of a problem. If an author believes that conflicts are possible, she or he may wish to submit a list of the individuals to be excluded as referees for the given manuscript. The Editor will usually honor such a request.

IJBE follows the standard publication ethics guidelines set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, available at www.publicationethics.org. All Authors, Peer-Reviewers and Editors work together in a great harmony to ensure the highest ethical standards in publishing quality research work in our journals. All scientific studies should be carried out in accordance with the relevant national and local guidelines. Each author(s) warrants that his or her research institution has fully approved the protocol for all scientific studies conducted in compliance with ethical and humane principles of research after ethics committee approval. By submitting the manuscript, the authors warrant that the entire work is original and unpublished; it is submitted only to this Journal and all text, data, figures/tables or other illustrations included in the research article are completely original and unpublished, and these have not been previously published or submitted elsewhere in any form or media whatsoever. All authors are responsible for the complete contents of their manuscript. The author(s) warrant that the work contains no unlawful or libelous statements and opinions and liable materials of any kind whatsoever, do not infringe on any copyrights, intellectual property rights, personal rights or rights of any kind of others, and does not contains any plagiarized, fraudulent, improperly attributed materials, instructions, procedures, information or ideas that might cause any harm, damage, injury, losses or costs of any kind to person or property. Each author(s) agrees to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the IJBE Editor for any breach of such warranties. It is authors' responsibility to obtain written copyright permissions from other sources (publishers) for reproduction of any figures, tables, photos, illustrations, text or other copyright materials from previously published work. It is the policy of IJBE to own the copyright of all contributions it publishes. To comply with the Copyright Law, a Copyright Transfer Form that transfer copyright of the article to the publisher must be completed by the authors prior to publication of an accepted article in this journal. Authors must submit a signed copy of the Copyright Transfer Agreement with their manuscripts. Authors cannot submit a manuscript for publication to other journals simultaneously. It is waste of valuable resources because editors and referees spent a great deal of time processing submitted manuscripts. It is also unethical to republish similar research articles (text/figures/tables) again because journals have limited page space and it most likely violates copyrights which have already been transferred to the first journal. Therefore, all journals require a signed author's copyright transfer agreement stating the originality of the research work submitted through a manuscript. As stated above that authors should submit original, new and unpublished research work to the journal. The ethical issues such as plagiarism, fraudulent and duplicate publication, violation of copyrights, authorship and conflict of interest are serious issues concerning ethical integrity when submitting a manuscript to a journal for publication. If the author requests withdrawal of manuscript after submission within the time span when the manuscript is still in the peer-reviewing process with Editors/Referees, author is allowed to withdraw the manuscript without any withdrawal penalty whatsoever. However, it is unethical to withdraw a submitted manuscript from one journal if accepted by another journal. After the manuscript is accepted for publication either through journal editors or guest editors, the withdrawal is not permitted by IJBE.