Review and Publication Policy

Policy Document of Negotiations

1. Publication Charge Policy
   All articles published in our journals are open access and freely available online, immediately upon publication.
   The journal does not charge an article submission fee.
   Authors do not pay Article Processing Charge (APC) and Article Publication Fee (APF) to cover the costs of peer review administration and management, professional production of articles in PDF and other formats, and dissemination of published papers in various venues, in addition to other publishing functions.
   All the expenses are born by its publisher. There are no charges for rejected articles, no submission charges, and no surcharges based on the length of an article, figures, or supplementary data. All the items (Manuscripts, Editorials, Teaching Modules, Corrections, Addendums, Retractions, Comments, etc.) are published free of charge.
2. Authorship Policy
3. a. uthorship credits may only be given to those who have made a substantial contribution in constructing the article.
   The corresponding author of the article holds the responsibility to give credits to the co-authors that are significantly involved in the work. Also, the corresponding author should make sure that all the co-authors have approved the final submission and ready-to-publish version of the article.
   Others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research should be acknowledged for their contribution in an "Acknowledgement" section.
   b. Changes in Authorship
   The authors are fully responsible to provide the names of the authors upon submitting the article to the journal. Once the article is accepted for publication, any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of the authors’ names will not be entertained unless approved by the journal’s editor. To request such a change, the corresponding author must provide the journal’s editor with: (a) the reason for the change in the author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement, along with the confirmation from the author being added or removed. Only in exceptional circumstances and with considerable reason/s will the editor may consider the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the editor considers the request, the processing of the manuscript for publication will be put on hold. If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests may not be entertained by the editor.
   c. Order of Authors
   It the responsibility of the authors to have a mutual agreement on the order of the authors before submitting the article to the journal. Any such disagreements must be ruled out before the submission.
   d. Guest Authorship
   The “guest” author makes no significant contributions to the study, hence, do not qualify for authorship. The journal does not allow the appearance of guest authorship on the articles.
   e. Anonymous Authorship
   Because authorship should be transparent and requires public accountability, it is not appropriate to use pseudonyms or to publish scientific reports anonymously. In extremely rare cases, when the author can make a credible claim that attaching his or her name to the document could cause serious hardship (e.g., a threat to personal safety or loss of employment), a journal editor may decide to publish anonymous content.
   f. Acknowledgment
   In the Acknowledgments section, authors may wish to include the names and contributions of those whose involvement in a study did not qualify them for authorship (because of the journal policy) but have contributed to the article in some way.
   g. Contributors
   "Ghost" and/or "Guest" author phenomenon has been common in the traditional listing of research papers. This has been raising inappropriate authorship practice in which some individuals did not have an actual input in the experiment. For this, the journal highly recommends that only authors who have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript shall be listed individually in the submitted manuscript (including students and lab technicians).
   h. Duplicate Submission
   Articles that are found to have been published elsewhere, or are under consideration for publishing elsewhere, will be considered as "duplicated" material. In case the author(s) have used their own previously published work (or work that is currently under review), they are asked to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions and adds value differently (from the previous work).
   i. Citation Manipulation
   Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations in order to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will be considered as a "citation manipulation"-containing material.
   3. Accessibility Policy
   We are committed to continuously enhance the accessibility of our published database to maximize readability without any interruption. We process all our articles through the Open Journal System (OJS) that automatically generates the files in ‘HTML’ and converts those that are not in the desired format, making our files easily accessible on the web to all kinds of users.
   Open Access Statement
   This is an open-access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
   All articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. Non-commercial and commercial use and distribution in any medium are permitted, provided the author and the journal are properly credited.
   4. Corrections and Retraction Policy
   Authors who discover errors in articles they have published should have the corresponding author contact the journal’s editorial office with a detailed description of the correction that is needed. Corrigenda (corrections of author’s errors) and errata (corrections of publisher’s errors) will be published at no charge to the authors. Requests for corrections that affect the interpretation or conclusions of a published article will be reviewed by the editors.
   An article may be retracted when the integrity of the published work is substantially undermined owing to errors in the conduct, analysis, and/or reporting of the study. Violation of publication or research ethics may also result in a study’s retraction. The original article is marked as retracted but a PDF version remains available to readers, and the retraction statement is bi-directionally linked to the original published paper. Retraction statements will typically include a statement of assent or dissent from the authors.
   In exceptional circumstances, the editorial office reserves the right to remove an article from the journal’s online platforms. Such action may be taken when (i) the editorial office has been advised that content is defamatory, infringes a third party’s intellectual property right, right to privacy, or other legal rights, or is otherwise unlawful; (ii) a court or government order has been issued, or is likely to be issued, requiring removal of such content; (iii) content, if acted upon, would pose an immediate and serious risk to health. Removal may be temporary or permanent. Bibliographic metadata (e.g. title and authors) will be retained and will be accompanied by a statement explaining why the content has been removed.
   5. Digital Archiving Policy
   The journal is fully committed to storing the published material on digital archives to ensure that the articles will always be available to readers, even in the event of a publication being lost or discontinued. The best way to ensure that journal articles will always be accessible to readers, is to deposit all published articles into a long-term digital preservation service or archive.
   Besides, the journal also assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to all its issues and the contents to facilitate reaching their permanent links on the internet.
   Moreover, the journal management system automatically self-archives the data on our servers regularly.
   6. Confidentiality Policy
   The editors and the publication handling/managing staff keep all information about a submitted manuscript confidential and share it only with those involved in the evaluation, review, and publication processes as per the journal’s publication policy. The journal is operating through an automated journal management system to ensure a transparent double-blind peer review process as well as the confidentiality of the information. The Editors should consider adding a confidentiality notice to all correspondence, including reviewer forms, to serve as a reminder to authors, editors, and reviewers.