Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Ethical standards for publication exist to ensure high-quality scientific publications, public trust in scientific findings, and that people receive credit for their ideas. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) abides by its Code of Conduct and aims to adhere to its Best Practice Guidelines.

Article Assessment

All manuscripts are subject to peer review and are expected to meet standards of academic excellence. If approved by the editor, submissions will be considered by peer-reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors.

Our Research Integrity team will occasionally seek advice outside standard peer review, for example, on submissions with serious ethical, security, biosecurity, or societal implications. We may consult experts and the academic editor before deciding on appropriate actions, including but not limited to: recruiting reviewers with specific expertise, assessment by additional editors, and declining to further consider a submission.

The publication ethics is a commitment which draws up some moral limitations and responsibilities of research journals. The text is adapted according to the “Standard Ethics”, approved by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, and the publication principles of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Authors, Reviewers, editorial boards and editor-in-chief ought to know and commit all principles of research ethics and related responsibilities. Article submission, review of reviewers and editor-in-chief's acceptance or rejection, are considered as journals law compliance otherwise the journals have all the rights.
  1. Authors must present their work in accordance with the journal's standards and title.
  2. Authors must ensure that they have written their original work/research. Their work/researches must also provide accurate data, underlying other's references.
  3. Authors are responsible for their work's accuracy.

Note 1: Publishing an article is not known as acceptance of its contents by journal.

  1. Duplicate submission is not accepted. In other words, none of the article's parts must carry on reviewing or publishing elsewhere.
  2. Overlapping publication, where the author uses his/her previous findings or published date with changes, is rejected.
  3. Authors are asked to have authors' permission for an accurate citation. When using one's direct speech, quotation marks (" ") are necessary.
  4. Corresponding authors must ensure that the complete information of all involved authors in the article.

Note 2: Do not write the statement of "Gift Authorship" and do not omit the statement of "Ghost Authorship".

  1. Corresponding author is responsible for the priorities of co-authors after their approval.
  2. Paper submission means that all of the authors have satisfied whole financial and local supports and have introduced them.
  3. Author(s) is/are responsible for any fault or inaccuracy of the article and in this case, the journal's authorities must be informed immediately.
  4. Author(s) is/are asked to provide and reserve raw data one year after publication, in order to respond to the journal audiences' questions.

Author(s) must avoid the research and publication misconduct. If some cases of research and publication misconduct occur within each step of submission, review, edition or publication, journals have the right to legal action. The cases are listed as below:

  1. Fabrication : Fabrication is the practice of inventing data or results and reporting them in the research. Both of these misconducts are fraudulent and seriously alter the integrity of research. Therefore, articles must be written based on original data and use of falsified or fabricated data is strongly prohibited.
  2. Falsification : Falsification is the practice of omitting or altering research materials, equipment, data, or processes in such a way that the results of the research are no longer accurately reflected in the research record.
  3. Plagiarism : Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else's writing, conversation, idea, claims or even citations without any acknowledgment or explanation of the work producer or speaker.
  4. Wrongful Appropriation: Wrongful appropriation occurs when author(s) benefits another person's efforts and after a little change and manipulations in the research work, publish it on his/her own definitions.
  5. False Attribution : It represents that a person is the author of a work but she/ he was not involved in the research.

Reviewers must consider the followings:

  1. Qualitative, contextual and scientific study in order to improve articles' quality and content.
  2. To inform the editor-in-chief when he accepts or rejects the review and introduces an alternative.
  3. Must not accept the articles which consider the benefits of persons, organizations and companies or personal relationships; also the articles which she/he, own, contributed in its writing or analysis.
  4. The reviewing must be carried out upon scientific documents and any self, professional, religious and racial opinion is prohibited.
  5. Accurate review and declaration of the article's strengths and weaknesses through a clear, educational and constructive method.
  6. Responsibility, accountability, punctuality, interest, ethics adherence and respect to others' rights.
  7. Not to rewrite or correct the article according to his/her personal interest.
  8. Be sure of accurate citations. Also, remember the cases which haven't been cited in the related published research.
  9. Avoid expressing the information and details of articles.
  10. Reviewers must not benefit from new data or contents in favour of/against personal research; even for criticism or discrediting the author(s). The reviewer is not permitted to further more details after a reviewed article being is published.
  11. Reviewers are prohibited to deliver an article to another one for reviewing except with permission of the editor-in-chief. Reviewer and co-reviewer's identification must be noted in each article's documents.
  12. Reviewer must not contact the author(s). Any contact with the authors must be made through the Journal.
  13. Trying to report "research and publication misconduct" and submitting the related documents to the editor-in-chief.
  1. Journal maintenance and quality improvement are the main aims of the editorial board.
  2. Editorial board must introduce the journal to universities and international communities and publish the articles of other universities and international societies on their priority.
  3. Editorial board must not have quotas and excess of their personal article publishing.
  4. Editorial board is responsible for selecting the reviewers as well as accepting or rejecting an article after reviewers' comments.
  5. Editorial board must be well-known experts with several publications. They ought to be responsible, accountable, truthful, adhere to professional ethics and contribute to improving journal aims.
  6. Editorial board is expected to have a database of suitable reviewers for journals and to update the information regularly.
  7. Editorial board must try to aggregate qualified moral, experienced and well-known reviewers.
  8. Editorial board must welcome deep and reasonable reviews, prevent superficial and poor reviews, and deal with one-sided and contemptuous reviews.
  9. Editorial board must record and archive the whole review's documents as scientific documents and to keep the reviewers' name confidential.
  10. Editorial board must inform the final result of the review to the corresponding author immediately.
  11. Editorial board must keep the article's contents confidential and do not disclose its information to others.
  12. Editorial board ought to prevent any conflict of interests due to any personal, commercial, academic and financial relations which may impact on accepting and publishing the presented articles.
  13. Editor-in-chief must check each type of research and publication misconduct which reviewers report seriously.
  14. If a research and publication misconduct occurs in an article, the editor-in-chief should omit it immediately and inform indexing databases or audiences.
  15. In the case of being a research and publication misconduct, the editorial board is responsible to represent a corrigendum to audiences rapidly.
  16. Editorial board must benefit of audiences' new ideas in order to improve publication policies, structure and content quality of articles.
  17. ·Honesty and transparency is must to become an Editorial Board member, where an Editor should judge every submission equally and transparently.
  18. Providing the final judgment on the articles assigned within the allotted time with proper reason and clarification should be done by the Editor.
  19. Editor must remember the policy of fast and effective peer review and further process therefore, must communicate with the reviewers or authors depending on the stage of article processing in case of any delay.
  20. Editors will be responsible to convey the expectations of the journal to the reviewers with the review scope, quality and timeliness for an effective, fair and constructive review for the assigned submission.
  21. If any special issue proposal is submitted to the journal, the assigned Editorial Board member must review the proposal for suitability with the scope of the journal, timeliness and assessing the scope and the importance of the topic.
  22. Guest Editor can handle a special issue independently while maintaining regular communication with the Editorial Board member.
  23. Once a proposal has been accepted by the Editorial Board members for creating a special issue, the corresponding guest editors will be responsible for handling and processing of the special issue articles.

References

1. "Standard Ethics", approved by Vice-Presidency for Research & Technology, the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology

2. Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE Code of Conduct, www.publicationethics.org