Ethical principles of journal

Ethical principles of journal and evidences from publication misconduct

Journal’s code of ethics is designed to achieve the goal of confidence building in the process of review and publication. The ethical policies of this magazine are based on the principles of Committee on Publication Ethics (Cope) and compliance with the publication’s code of ethics of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology. In the code of ethics, journal policies are presented to ensure the ethical behavior of all participants involved in the process. Authors, reviewers, scientific secretaries and editor in chief should observe these ethical principles when cooperating with this publication.

See the text of the COPE ethical code here.

Link of COPE ethical code in the original language from the site http://publicationethics.org

 

“This journal is a member of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and complies with the highest ethical standards in accordance with ethical laws”.

 

Duties and responsibilities of the publisher, editor in chief, scientific secretaries, reviewers, authors

 

  • Duties and responsibilities of the publisher

1-     The personal information of the authors of is confidential and protected at all times by all persons who have accessibility to it, such as the editor in chief, the editorial staff, the editorial board and the executive secretary;

2-     The decision is made on the papers at the editorial session and according to the comments of the editorial staff, the paper is rejected or the reviewers are determined.

3-     All received papers will be reviewed by at least two reviewers without knowing the names of the authors. After concluding, comments of the reviewers will be reflected to the author by the office staffs.

4-     The editorial board should never be involved in the decisions of the editorial board regarding their works and papers.

5-     This journal assumes that the decisions made regarding received papers are only based on professional reviews and are not of personal interest.

6-     This journal controls the observance of ethics by the editor in chief, scientific secretaries, editorial staff and reviewers.

7-     This journal is constantly analyzing papers in terms of plagiarism and probable misconduct.

8-     This journal will provide necessary corrections, explanations and revisions when required.

9-     This journal will deal with any misconduct if it is proved.

 

  • Duties and responsibilities of the editor in chief and scientific secretaries

1-     Scientific secretaries of this journal should keep submitted copies of the paper confidential until its publishing.

2-     The editor in chief, the scientific secretaries and the reviewers shall make decisions regarding the publication or non-publication of a copy.

3-     The scientific secretaries of this journal should preserve the principal of not knowing the reviewers name.

4-     The scientific secretaries of this journal should avoid conflicts of interest.

5-     The scientific secretaries of this journal are bound to observe scientific protection and seek to meet the scientific needs of their audiences.

6-     Scientific secretaries of this journal identify plagiarism and possible deceptions and provide corrections, explanations and revisions when required.

7-     The scientific secretaries of this journal should only focus on scientific content.

8-     The scientific secretaries of this journal should not disclose information of papers for the persons other than the authors, the corresponding author and the reviewers.

9-     Not published copies will not be used by scientific secretaries or other members for personal purposes.

10-The reviewing process in this journal will be of double-side hidden type; so that the reviewer is unclear to the author and the reviewer does not know the author's name.

 

  • Duties and responsibilities of reviewers

1-     The reviewers of this journal should cooperate with the scientific secretaries to decide on the publication of submitted papers.

2-     The invited reviewers to this journal should try to maintain confidentiality of submitted copies.

3-     The reviewers are required to observe the confidentiality of the submitted copies and do not use their information for personal purposes.

4-     The comments of reviewers regarding submitted copies should be technical and professional.

5-     Reviewers shall not review copies in which interest conflicts existed with one of the authors, companies, or institutions.

6-     Selected reviewers should announce the results to the editor in chief immediately after the initial review within a reasonable time that includes:

  1. Not participation in reviewing paper due to the lack of subject relevance with the reviewer’s specialty or lack of time.
  2. Delay in reviewing due to busy time, lack of accessibility to sufficient facilities, and so on

7-     The papers review should be based on scientific evidences and enough argumentation, results should be expressed clearly, documents to be provided to the publications and authors and avoid personal, ethnic and religious comments in reviewing papers.

8-     Other duty of the reviewers is to pay attention to the references used in the paper. All research, topics and quotes that are used in the paper should be completely referred in the bibliography, and vice versa. Reviewers should not accept papers that benefits of special individuals, institutions and companies are achieved through it or in which personal relationships are observed.

9-     The reviewer must draw attention of the editor in chief to any significant similarity or overlap between the under consideration paper or any other published paper that he is aware of.

 

  • Duties and responsibilities of authors

1-     Submitted paper or its content should not be previously published in another publication or to be submitted to another publication at the same time. In addition, if accepted in the journal, it should not be presented or published elsewhere.

2-     The corresponding author should be sure of the consent of the other authors and announce this consent in writing to the journal office.

3-     The authors allow editing paper to be more readable.

4-     The authors are expected to briefly outline sponsors and who helped in implementation and preparation of the research process.

5-     The authors should sign ethnic commitment form.

6-     In open-access journals, authors have the ownership right on the paper, but besides that, everyone is allowed to download, print, and distribute the paper.

7-   All authors of paper should agree on responsibility of the corresponding author for the next revisions.

8-  When the author/authors find an important error in their paper, they should immediately notify the scientific secretary to correct it.

9-  The list of authors' names should exactly indicate that who did the research and who wrote the paper. It is necessary to mention the name of the corresponding author and colleagues in the paper and care must be taken to avoid unrelated names. Corresponding author is the person has the main contribution in preparing, designing and implementing paper and other authors are also referred to as collaborators. Corresponding author should ensure that the names and information of all authors have been mentioned and there are no unrelated names other than authors.

10-Be sure to check the number and order of the authors name as well as corresponding author; because the order and name of the authors are presented in the original version will be considered. Any changes in the number or order of the authors names will be possible prior to the publication, with the permission and signature of all authors. After publication, it will only be amended if there are reasonable and acceptable reasons to be approved by the editorial board.

11-Papers submitted by the authors should be work of the author and any use of other people's research is allowed by mentioning references in the paper.

12-Rejected or revoked papers will be removed from the archive after six months and journal will not have any responsibility against them.

13-The journal examines only one paper from each author at the same time and other articles of the author will not be considered until the final state of the first paper to be finalized.

14-Papers may be pursued solely through the website or emails.

15-If the authors identify the paper reviewers for any reason and call them with any motivation, paper publication will be canceled in any situation.

16-Since plagiarism is considered as one of the serious and immoral mistakes, all authors should know that submitted papers to this journal may be analyzed by plagiarism software.

17-All authors should study the process of sending a copy to this journal.

18-The authors should be aware that in the case of violating ethical principles, they will be placed on black list and none of their papers will be accepted in the future and other related journals will also be aware of the ethics violations.

19-The authors are required to pay 500,000 Rials (USD 3.5) for submitting paper and 1500,000 Rials (USD 10) for arranging papers according to the predefined layout and assigning DOI code.

 

Examples of violating publication’s ethical principles by the authors

Plagiarism: Plagiarism is intentional use of the papers, ideas, information and research results of another person in his own name. Even using a sentence from another person or his previous sentences without mentioning reference is considered plagiarism. All papers submitted to this journal will be analyzed by plagiarism software.

 

Data creation and distortion: Data creation occurs when the researcher did not carry out a study in practice, but provides data and conclusions. Distortion occurs when researcher conducts an investigation but changes the data and results.

 

Simultaneous submission: Simultaneous submission occurs when a paper is sent for two journals.

 

Duplicate submission: Duplicate submission occurs when two or more papers have the same assumptions, data, and results.

 

Repeat submission: Repeat submission means dividing a study (or dissertation) into multiple papers and submitting them.

 

Incorrect contribution of another author: All the authors listed in the paper should contribute in the paper and names of unrelated people, who are not involved in the paper, should not be considered in authors list.

 

References manipulation: It occurs when different references are mentioned in the last part of the text, while they have not been mentioned in the text, or vice versa, when different references have been mentioned, but in the bibliographic list of the paper, there is no name from that reference.

 

In the case of any other inconsistency and violating ethical principles of the publication, it will be treated in accordance with the ethical principles of COPE.