The editors are committed to meeting and upholding standards of ethical behavior at all stages of the publication process and therefore we follow closely the industry association Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) that sets standards and provide guidelines for best practices in order to meet these requirements.
The editors of the Proceedings are committed to:
- making fair and unbiased decisions in depended from commercial consideration and ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process;
- adopting editorial policies that encourage maximum transparency and complete, honest reporting;
- pursuing authors, reviewers and editorial misconduct by taking all allegations and suspicions of misconduct seriously, but also giving the opportunity to authors to respond to accusations of serious misconduct;
- guarding the integrity of the published record by issuing corrections and retractions when needed and pursuing suspected or alleged research and publication misconduct;
- Having appropriate policies in place for handling editorial conflict of interest.
Below is a summary of our key expectations of peer-reviewers and authors.
1. ETHICAL EXPECTATIONS
Reviewers’ responsibilities towards authors, editors and readers
Reviewers who realize that their expertise is limited have a responsibility to make their degree of competence clear to the editor. Reviewers need not be expert in every aspect of an article’s content, but they should accept an assignment only if they have adequate expertise to provide an authoritative assessment.
Reviewers should provide written, unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the work, together with the documented basis for the reviewer’s opinion (using the unify peer review template prepared by the editor)
Reviewer comments and conclusions should be based on an objective and impartial consideration of the facts, exclusive of personal or professional bias. They should acknowledge positive aspects of the material under review, identify negative aspects constructively, and indicate the improvements needed.
The submitted article should not be retained or copied, and the reviewers should not make any use of the data, arguments, or interpretations, unless they have the authors’ permission.
Reviewers that suspect misconduct will write in confidence to the editor.
Reviewers should be aware of any potential conflict of interest and should alert the editor to these, and if necessary, they will withdraw their services for that manuscript.
The responsibilities towards readers are to ensure that the methods are adequately detailed to allow the reader to judge the scientific merit of the study design and be able to replicate the study, if desired and to ensure that the article cites all relevant work by other scientists.
Author/s responsibilities
Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors.
All authors must take responsibility for the content of their paper. In cases of multidisciplinary nature of the research the individual contributions can be disclose in order to resolve the responsibility. Therefore, all authors need to confirm/assert that the manuscript (Link Author/s Statement):
• Is a result of individual research conducted in an ethical and responsible manner that comply with the relevant legislation and to acknowledge and cite content reproduced from other sources
• The results are presented, honestly and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation
• The paper has not been published or accepted for publication elsewhere
Authors are expected to declare to the editors the relevant and potential conflict of interest (personal, commercial, political, academic or financial) that could be considered or viewed as exerting an undue influence on his or her duties at any stage during the publication process.
Authors are expected to obtain permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere.
The content offered in the Proceedings remains the intellectual property of the authors and their publishers respectively, in compliance with the Macedonian copyright legislation.
Authors who receive an editorial decision of revise-resubmit are expected to submit the revised paper within the time frame provided in the action letter. Failure to do so may rescind the invitation to revise the paper.
Authors are expected to return copy-edited versions and galley proofs and answer queries regarding the proofs by the provided deadlines. Failure to do so may result in the paper not appearing in the Proceedings as scheduled or in the article being published as is.
2. PLAGIARISM STATEMENT (PLAGIARISM POLICY)
The Proceedings of ETIMA conference adheres to the following definition of plagiarism: Plagiarism is defined as using someone else’s ideas, words, data, or other material produced by them without acknowledgement. Plagiarism can occur in respect to all types of sources and media, including:
• text, illustrations, musical quotations, extended mathematical derivations, computer code, etc.;
• material downloaded from websites or drawn from manuscripts or other media;
• published and unpublished material, including lectures, presentations, and grey literature.
In other words, plagiarism takes many forms, from passing off’ another’s paper as the author’s own paper, to copying or paraphrasing substantial parts of another’s paper (without attribution), to claiming results from research conducted by others.
Specific form of plagiarism is the self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism is the redundant reuse of author’s own work (e.g., text, data, and images), including text translated from another language, usually without proper citation. It creates repetition in the academic literature and can skew meta-analyses if you publish the same sets of data multiple times as “new” data.
Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable for our journal. Therefor it is required that the authors ensure to have written entirely original works (the authors are obliged to sign Author’s Statement, that is part of this PEMS), and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.
The editors of ETIMA proceedings reserve the right to check all submissions through appropriate plagiarism checking tools. The integrity of the publication is paramount, therefore any suspected plagiarism or self-plagiarism will be treated with utmost seriousness in line with COPE guidelines. Submissions containing suspected plagiarism, in whole or part, will be rejected by the editors in the initial screening of the paper in accordance with our procedure. If plagiarism is discovered post-publication, we will follow our guidance outlined in the Procedures for dealing with unethical behavior of these PEMS. We expect our readers, reviewers, and editors to raise any suspicions of plagiarism, either by contacting the relevant editor or by emailing Оваа е-адреса е заштитена од спамботови. Треба да ви е овозможено JavaScript за да ја видите.
3. PROCEDURES FOR DEALING WITH UNETHICAL BEHAVIOUR
The general principle confirming misconduct is intention to cause others to regard as true that, which is not true. The editors will take reasonably responsive measures when ethical complaints have been presented concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper, in conjunction with the publisher. Such measures will generally include contacting the author of the manuscript or paper and giving due consideration
of the respective complaint or claims made in case when editors judge that the misconduct is less serious.
But in cases the editors decide that the misconduct in question qualifies as serious misconduct they may also include further communications to the relevant institutions and research bodies, and if the complaint is upheld, the publication of a correction, retraction, expression of concern, or other note, as may be relevant. Serious misconduct also implies that the employers of the accused will be notified. Every reported act of unethical publishing behavior will be looked into, even if it is discovered years after publication.
Outcomes (in increasing order of severity, they may be applied separately or in conjunction)
- Letter of explanation and education for purpose of informing or educating the author or reviewer of the acceptable standards (in case of genuine misunderstanding of principles);
- Letter of reprimand to the author or reviewer that points out the misconduct and contains a warning to future behavior;
- A formal letter to the author/s or reviewer/s department/employer;
- Formal retraction or withdrawal of a publication from the Proceedings;
- Imposition of a formal embargo on contributions and refusal to accept future submissions from the person responsible for the misconduct, for a stated period.