Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice

PUBLICATION AND AUTHORSHIP

Each article proposed to be published in Research and Science Today must have scientific value. The authors will use footnotes (following the model from template) and will provide to redaction a bibliographic list, at the end of the research. If the work is being conducted under a project grant or funding and benefits, this subsidiary will mention in the first subsidiary note. RST journal does not charge for publication.

Plagiarism or self-plagiarism are prohibited and lead to the rejection of publication material.

Publication of the same article or study in several magazines or the tentative of publishing it in several magazines, lead to the rejection of publishing.

AUTHOR’S RESPONSIBILITIES

Each study is reviewed before published. The process used by Research and Science Today is double-blind review by the specialists from our Scientific Committee. After reviewing, the material can be accepted, accepted after making some changes or rejected. The authors must adapt materials for the needs of the reviewers. Otherwise, it will reject their publication. So, the authors are obliged to participate in peer review process.

If a study has multiple authors, each of whom must have made a significant contribution to achievement. Before publication, the authors will sign an affidavit in certifying this. In this statement they also noted that all data used in the research are real and authentic. In case of errors, the authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR

Corresponding author is an author responsible for all the communication regarding the manuscript in all stages. He/she is also responsible for approval of revised files by all authors.

PEER REVIEW / RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE REVIEWERS

As we have already mentioned, the review process is double-blind review. In this process, reviewers have the following obligations:

Judgments should be objective;
Reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the research funders;
Reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited;
Reviewed articles should be treated confidentially.

EDITORIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

In the journal publication process, editors have the following responsibilities:

complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article;
should have no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept;
only accept a paper when reasonably certain;
when errors are found, promote publication of correction or retraction;
preserve anonymity of reviewers.

LICENSE

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0)

This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This means you can share, remix, adapt, and build upon our work, as long as you provide appropriate credit and do not use the material for commercial purposes.

What you are allowed to do under CC BY-NC 4.0:

Share — Copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
Adapt — Remix, transform, and build upon the material.
All this, as long as you comply with the license terms.

Conditions:

Attribution — You must provide appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Non Commercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

For more details and the full text of the license, please visit the official Creative Commons page.

PUBLISHING ETHICS ISSUES

Editorial board is monitoring/safeguarding publishing ethics by editorial board;
Editorial board provides guidelines for retracting articles;
The members of editorial board have to maintain the integrity of the academic record;
The editorial board also preclude business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards;
The editorial board can ask to the authors to provide corrections, clarifications or retractions when needed. He is also the one who must assure the publication of this information on the site and in the review.
Editorial committee will deal with prevention of plagiarism or fraud situations.

HUMAN AND ANIMAL RIGHTS, AND INFORMED CONSENT

Published research must comply with the guidelines for human studies and animal welfare regulations. Authors should state that subjects have given their informed consent and that the study protocol has been approved by the institute’s committee on human research. Further, they should also state that animal experiments conform to institutional standards.

When reporting experiments on people, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national), or if no formal ethics committee is available, with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2013

Copies of written informed consents should be kept for studies on human subjects. For the clinical studies with human subjects, there should be a certificate, an agreement, or the approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the author’s affiliated institution. If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request copies of these documents to resolve questions about IRB approval and study conduct.

PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is not acceptables. With the submission, authors declare the originality of their work by properly citing, re-using, or copying previous publications and by signing a statement of originality.

If plagiarism is detected (Plagius software) during the peer review process, the manuscript would be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, the publisher retract the paper.

ERRATA, CORRECTIONS, RETRACTATION AND EXPRESSIONS OF CONCERN

Errata

Authors and readers are encouraged to notify the Editor-in-Chief if they discover errors in published content, authors’ names and affiliations or if they have reasons for concern over the legitimacy of a publication. In such cases, RST will publish an Errata (after the consultation with authors of the article) and/or replace or retract the article.

Corrections

Errors in published papers may be identified requiring publication of a correction in the form of a corrigendum or erratum. Because articles can be read and cited as soon as they are published, any changes thereafter could potentially impact those who read and cited the earlier version. Publishing an erratum or corrigendum increases the likelihood readers will find out about the change and also explains the specifics of the change.

Expressions of Concern

Publication of an expression of concern notice may be considered if:

There is inconclusive evidence of research or publication misconduct by the authors.
There is evidence that the findings are unreliable but the authors’ institution will not investigate the case.
There is an investigation into alleged misconduct related to the publication that has not been, or would not be, fair and impartial or conclusive.
An investigation is underway but a judgement will not be available for a considerable time.

Expressions of concern and retractions should not simply be a letter to the editor. Rather, they should be prominently labelled, appear on an electronic page that is included in an electronic or a print Table of Contents to ensure proper indexing, and include in their heading the title of the original article. Online, the retraction and original article should be linked in both directions and the retracted article should be clearly labelled as retracted in all its forms (Abstract, full text, PDF).

Article withdrawal

Articles may be withdrawn by corresponding author before accepting for publication. Withdrawal of articles is strongly discouraged and only used in exceptional circumstances for early versions articles which have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published yet (“articles in press”). Such versions may contain errors, may have accidentally been submitted twice or may be in violation a journal’s publishing ethics guidelines (e.g. multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, etc.). In such situations, especially in case of legal/ethical violations or false/inaccurate data which could pose a detrimental risk if used, it may be decided to withdraw the early version of the article from our electronic platform.

Note that if Authors retain copyright for an article this does not mean they automatically have the right to withdraw it after publication. The integrity of the published scientific record is of paramount importance and these policies on retractions and withdrawals still apply in such cases.

Article retraction

Retraction may be considered:

If there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error).
If the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross referencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication).
If the research constitutes plagiarism.
Where there is evidence of fraudulent authorship.
If there is evidence of unethical research.

The COPE retraction guidelines can be found on the COPE website.

Article removal: legal limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory, or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article replacement

In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to withdraw the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances the procedures for ‘Article withdrawal after Publication’ will be followed with the difference that the database Withdrawal notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document. This process will attract the Penalty. Depending upon the severity of the errors, the Author(s) may also be banned from submitting their article to the Journal.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST AND FUNDING

All the authors state that they have no conflicts of interest or funding in relation to the present article.

PRIVACY STATEMENT

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

See more at CSE’s White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications (Council of Science Editors).