Ethical standards
The journal follows the standards and guidelines provided by COPE, especially regarding misconduct and fraud, and how to act in front of such a case. COPE provides a code of conduct with best practices in publishing and flowcharts that describe the publisher’s and editor’s actions, if such a case has to be resolved: http://publicationethics.org/. To authors with proven misconduct or fraud the actions available in the flowcharts will be applied.
1 Conditions for submission of an article
Submission of a manuscript implies that the work has not been published and is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept publication fees. For ethics in publishing consult COPE http://publicationethics.org/.
Plagiarism, Duplicate Submission/Publication Policy
Plagiarism is the unreferenced use of published and unpublished ideas.
The journal has adopted a rigorous examination of every submitted manuscript towards plagiarism or text recycling using Similarity Check. This tool allows the Editors-in-Chief to quickly identify even partial use of already published content, which cannot be re-published in this journal for various reasons, such as copyright issues, auto plagiarism, plagiarism, etc. In case of doubt, and in order to avoid any forms of plagiarism or text recycling, authors are invited to visit relevant webpages of universities across the world dealing with this topic, or probably the websites of their own institutions.
Please visit these few examples:
Duplicate publication is publication of a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published, without clear, visible reference to the previous publication.
Should plagiarism or duplicate submission/publication be identified, the authors will be informed by the Editors-in-Chief. For a not yet published article, in case of conflicts, the relevant COPE guidelines are applied. The detailed and updated version of the way of action of the Editors-in-Chief is available on the website of COPE.
2 Authorship
COPE recommends that journals and publishers should have clear guidance in place to allow for transparency about who contributed to the work and in what capacity for authorship and contributorship as well as processes for managing potential disputes.
The list of criteria that must be met by all those designated as authors, is available here. Those contributors who do not meet all of the criteria shall be acknowledged.
3 Conflicts of interest
Authors must disclose whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. They should also state that they have full control of all primary data and that they agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested.
Any additional conflict of interest, on personal or any other level must also be disclosed.
4 Peer Reviewing
The manuscripts have all identifying information removed from them by the editors prior to the beginning of the review process. Then, all manuscripts submitted to the journal are submitted to three reviewers independent from the editorial committee of the journal. The reviewers are informed of the necessity to keep the manuscript confidential before acceptance and publication, and their identity will not be disclosed to the authors. Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, the editorial board decides whether the manuscript is:
- Accepted without modifications
- Accepted, after modifcations (depending on a second peer reviewing)
- Rejected
The Editors-in chief have full authority for acceptation/rejection of the submitted manuscripts.
5 Policies for publication of errata and for article retraction
Despite careful peer reviewing and article production, situations might occur where errata should be published or articles retracted. The Editors-in-chief, together with the publisher therefore follow the flowcharts established by COPE and published on their website (http://publicationethics.org/).
Data sharing policy
Authors are invited to prepare and deposit their data according to the FAIR data principles. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. The principles are available here. To summarize this, the dataset should be findable through a complete set of metadata, including a license for re-use and a data identifier (DOI or other). The dataset is accessible when access is open. Interoperable means that the data can be used and combined with other datasets in a format that is sufficiently widely distributed. Re-usability is achieved when the dataset is deposited with a corresponding Creative Commons open license and is downloadable. Furthermore, re-usability implies that parameters describing how this dataset has been collected needs to be disclosed. Machine and experimental conditions must be documented.