Monthly Academic Journal of Social Sciences
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Monthly Academic Journal of Social Sciences


  Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement - European Journal of Social Sciences (EJSS)

9. Publication Ethics

9.1 Conflicting interests

All authors, referees and editors must declare any conflicting interests related to the submitted manuscript. Referees are asked to declare their competing interests when they are returning their report on a manuscript. If an editor has a conflicting interest which could prevent them from making an unbiased decision on a manuscript then the editorial office will send the manuscript to an alternative editor for assessment.

Competing interests include the following:

For authors:

a. Employment – recent, current and anticipated by any organisation that may gain or lose financially through publication

b. Sources of funding – research support by any organisation that may gain or lose financially through publication

c. Personal financial interests – stocks and shares in companies that may gain or lose financially through publication

d. Any forms of remuneration from organisations that may gain or lose financially

e. Patents or patent applications which may be affected by publication

f. Membership of relevant organisations

For editors or referees:

a. Having a personal relationship with any of the authors or an editor

b. Working or having recently worked in the same department or institution as any of the authors.

c. Having recently been a supervisor or close collaborator or joint grant holder with any of the authors.

The authors must include the following at the end of their manuscript: The author(s) declare no competing interests.

9.2 Funding

Funding received for the research work described in the paper must be declared within the publication under the Acknowledgements section. This should include research funds (source and/or grant number), funding of the article processing charge and/or funding for writing or editing assistance.

9.3 Author conduct and copyright

All authors are required to agree to our licence requirements when submitting their work. By submitting to our journals and agreeing to this licence, the submitting author agrees on behalf of all authors that:

a. the work is original, has not previously been published and is not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere; and

b. the author has obtained permission to use any material which has been sourced from third parties (e.g. illustrations or charts), and the terms have been granted.

All articles in European Journal of Social Sciences (EJSS) ® are published under the creative commons license, which allows reuse and redistribution with attribution to the authors. See Section 6 for our Copyright and License policy

9.4 Referee conduct

Authors are entitled to expect that referees or other individuals including editors privy to the work an author submits to a journal will not steal their research ideas or plagiarise their work. Our journals require all referees to treat submitted material in confidence until it has been published. Any allegations of plagiarism or theft must be substantiated and will be treated seriously. See Section 4 for our Plagiarism Policy

9.5 Misconduct

9.5.1 Research misconduct

Research misconduct includes falsification, fabrication or plagiarism in proposing, performing, reviewing and/or reporting research results. Research misconduct does not include minor honest errors or differences of opinion.

If after assessment of the research work, the editor has concerns about a publication; a response will be sought from the authors. If the response is unsatisfactory, the editors will contact the author’s head of department or institute and can also choose to contact the author’s funding agency. In cases of published plagiarism or dual publication, an announcement will be made on the journal explaining the situation, including ‘retractions’ if work is proven to be fraudulent. See Section 4 for our Plagiarism Policy and Section 5 for our Retraction Policy

9.5.2 Redundant publication

European Journal of Social Sciences (EJSS) ® only consider article submissions which have not been published previously. Redundant publication, duplicate publication and text recycling is not acceptable and the authors must ensure that their research work is only published once.

Minor overlap of content may be unavoidable and must be reported transparently in the manuscript. In review articles, if text is recycled from an earlier publication, it must be presented with a novel development of previously published opinions and appropriate references to previous publications must be cited. See Section 4 for our Plagiarism policy.

9.6 Editorial standards and processes

9.6.1 Editorial independence

Editorial independence is respected. The Editor-in-chief’s decision is final.

9.6.2 Peer review systems

We ensure that the peer review process is fair and we aim to minimise bias.

Papers submitted are normally peer reviewed in a double-blind fashion (both author and referee names are concealed). If any confidential discussions have taken place between an author, editor and referee, they will remain in confidence unless explicit consent has been given by all concerned parties or if there are exceptional circumstances.

Editors or board members are never involved in editorial decisions about their own work and in these cases papers may be referred to other editors or the editor-in-chief. Editor-in-chief shall not be involved in editorial decisions about his/her own at any stage of the editorial process. We do not accept any kind of abusive behaviour or correspondence towards our staff or editors. Any author of a paper submitted to our journals who engages in abusive behaviour or correspondence towards staff or editors will have their paper immediately withdrawn from consideration for publication by the journal concerned. Consideration of subsequent submissions will be at the discretion of the Editor-in-chief.

See Section 2 for our Peer Review and Editorial Policy

9.6.3 Appeals

Authors have a right to appeal editorial decisions taken by European Journal of Social Sciences (EJSS)®. The author should submit the grounds for their appeal to the editorial office through email. Authors are discouraged from directly contacting any editorial board members or editors with their appeals. Following an appeal, all editorial decisions are conclusive and final decision rests with the Editor-in-chief. See Section 2.7.2 of our Peer Review and Editorial Policy

9.6.4 Standards of accuracy

European Journal of Social Sciences (EJSS) ® shall have the duty to publish corrections or other notifications. A ‘correction’ shall be normally used when a small part of an otherwise reliable publication proves to be misleading to the readers. A ‘retraction’ (notification of invalid results) will be issued if work is proven to be fraudulent or as a result of a significant error. See Section 5 for our Retraction Policy

9.7 Preprints

We are committed to increasing the accessibility of research and ensuring that it is communicated as rapidly as possible. To accelerate this process, we encourage researchers to deposit early versions of articles they intend to submit to a peer-reviewed journal in appropriate preprint repositories such as arXiv.

Preprints may be deposited at any time and made freely available. Posting a preprint on a recognised preprint server or repository does not constitute as a prior publication and will prejudice neither the peer review process nor publication in our journals.

Please note that once a manuscript has been revised and accepted to the journal it is no longer classed as a preprint, and the authors will grant license to publish.

When posting a preprint on a preprint server or a repository, we recommend that you:

a. make clear the status of the work, e.g. that it has not been formally peer reviewed or accepted by a journal (or other recognised venue);

b. take responsibility to safeguard sensitive information, such as identities of the participants (wherever applicable) or the location of endangered species (wherever applicable), and adhere to appropriate standards of reporting and ethical oversight.

c. add a link to the final publisher version, once the article is accepted and formally published.

See Section 6.6 Self archiving (by authors) of our Copyright and License policy

9.8 Data sharing

9.8.1 Open data policy

To allow others researchers to verify and further build upon the work published in European Journal of Social Sciences (EJSS)®, the authors must make available the data, code and/or research materials which are integral to the results in the article. All Datasets, files and code should be deposited in appropriate, recognised publicly available repositories. Authors should disclose during submission of the manuscript itself if there are any restrictions on the availability of data, code and research materials from their work.

Datasets, files and codes that have been deposited in an external repository should be appropriately cited in both the reference list and methods section.

See Section 7 for our Open Access policy

9.8.2 Supplementary material

The supplementary material feature can also be used to upload supporting figures, videos and other small files that do not contain raw data. All supplementary material will be made available on our journal website under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence, meaning that others are free to share, reuse and build upon the information, as long as they properly credit the original author. See Section 7 for our Open Access policy

9.8.3 Source code

Source code should be made available under an open source licence and deposited in an appropriate repository. Small amounts of source code can be included in the supplementary material.

9.9 Research ethics and animal treatment (wherever applicable)

Articles will be accepted only if they are considered ethically sound in the judgement of the editor(s). The studies should have obtained prior approval from relevant ethics committee and regulatory bodies in line with the Declaration of Helsinki. The authors should confirm that they have obtained informed consent from all the participants.

Authors should include details of animal welfare and relevant details of steps taken to ameliorate suffering in the Methods section of the paper. We encourage all authors to comply with the ‘Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments’ (ARRIVE) guidelines. Articles describing work with animals will be accepted only if the procedures/experiments used are clearly described and conform to institutional guidelines and the legal requirements of the country in which the work was carried out. A brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments must be included at the end of the article.

Referees are invited to express any ethical concerns regarding animal experimentation, human studies, conservation issues or potential risk of misuse or maltreatment of animals.

Page last updated Nov 21, 2018



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