1. Ethical Framework and Scope
Mehmet Akif Ersoy University Journal of The Institute of Educational Sciences (MAKÜ-EBED) is a national, peer-reviewed scientific journal. All publication processes are conducted in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices, the TR Dizin Journal Evaluation Criteria, the Higher Education Institutions Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Directive, and applicable legislation. Authors, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, and the publisher are expected to comply with these principles.
2. Publication Model, Open Access, and Fees
The journal is published online under a continuous publication model. Articles that complete the editorial and production processes are published in the relevant issue without waiting for a scheduled issue date. All published content is immediately and freely accessible. No submission, evaluation, processing, or publication fee is charged to authors or readers.
Authors retain the copyright to their articles. After acceptance, all authors must approve the journal’s current Ethical Responsibility, Copyright and Open License Form and grant MAKÜ-EBED the right of first publication and the right to keep the version of record permanently available as open access.
Accepted articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. The license permits sharing and adaptation in any medium provided that appropriate credit is given, a link to the license is supplied, changes are indicated, and the use is non-commercial. Third-party material identified separately in an article may be excluded from this license. Authors are responsible for obtaining any required permissions.
3. Editorial Evaluation and Peer Review
Submissions are first checked for scope, originality, ethical compliance, language, the current article template, author guidelines, required declarations, and similarity. Manuscripts that do not meet these requirements may be returned for correction or rejected before peer review.
The journal applies double-anonymous peer review. Each eligible manuscript is evaluated by at least two independent reviewers with relevant expertise; reviewers from different institutions are selected whenever possible. If the reports conflict, the editor may seek a third review or make a reasoned decision. The final publication decision belongs to the editor. Editorial decisions are based on scholarly merit, relevance, originality, methodological soundness, clarity, and compliance with ethical standards.
Manuscripts submitted by an editor or editorial board member are handled by an independent editor who has no conflict of interest with the submission. The submitting editor or board member cannot access or influence the evaluation and decision process.
4. Research Ethics, Ethics Committee Approval, and Consent
Research requiring ethics committee approval must have received approval before the research begins. The name of the committee, approval date, and decision/reference number must be stated in the Methods section and on the first or last page of the manuscript, and the approval document must be uploaded when requested.
This requirement includes, where applicable, research involving human participants or personal data and studies collecting data through surveys, scales, interviews, focus groups, observation, experiments, or similar methods. Informed consent must be obtained from participants; consent from a parent or legal guardian must be obtained for minors or individuals unable to consent. For case reports and identifiable information or images, explicit publication consent is required. Legal or institutional permissions required for scales, tests, data sets, archives, photographs, and other protected materials must also be obtained.
If ethics committee approval is not required, authors must provide a reasoned declaration in the manuscript. Retrospective approval cannot replace approval that should have been obtained before the research. Responsibility for the accuracy and sufficiency of all ethics and permission declarations belongs to the authors.
5. Authors’ Ethical Responsibilities
• Submit original work that has not been published previously and is not under consideration elsewhere.
• Report methods, data, findings, and limitations accurately; do not fabricate, falsify, manipulate, plagiarize, duplicate-publish, or inappropriately divide research results.
• Cite all sources and obtain permissions for copyrighted or restricted material.
• Limit authorship to persons who made a substantial scholarly contribution. All authors must approve the submitted and final versions. Requests to change authorship require a written explanation and the consent of all affected authors.
• Declare author contributions, funding and acknowledgements, conflicts of interest, ethics approval or exemption, informed consent, data availability, and the use of artificial intelligence tools.
• Provide valid institutional affiliations, country information, e-mail addresses, and ORCID identifiers.
• Provide the data or documents underlying the study when reasonably requested, subject to ethical, legal, privacy, and confidentiality restrictions.
• Inform the editor promptly of any material error or ethical concern discovered before or after publication and cooperate with correction or retraction procedures.
6. Reviewers’ Ethical Responsibilities
• Accept assignments only within their expertise and when they can complete the review objectively and on time.
• Decline the review and notify the editor if there is any conflict of interest or circumstance that may affect impartiality.
• Keep the manuscript and the review process confidential; do not share, reproduce, or use unpublished material for personal benefit.
• Prepare constructive, respectful, evidence-based reports and identify relevant uncited work or suspected ethical violations.
• Do not attempt to identify or contact authors and do not use the review process to impose unnecessary citations.
• Do not upload manuscripts, data, or review materials to public or third-party generative artificial intelligence systems.
7. Editors’ and Editorial Board’s Ethical Responsibilities
• Evaluate submissions impartially, without discrimination based on identity, institution, nationality, gender, belief, political view, or similar characteristics.
• Protect the confidentiality of authors, reviewers, correspondence, and unpublished material.
• Recuse themselves from submissions involving a conflict of interest and assign the process to an independent editor.
• Select qualified and independent reviewers, protect double anonymity, prevent coercive citation practices, and base decisions on scholarly and ethical criteria.
• Investigate credible allegations of misconduct regardless of when they are raised and follow COPE guidance when deciding on corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, or other actions.
• Provide reasoned decisions, consider appeals fairly, preserve editorial records, and safeguard editorial independence.
• Do not upload confidential submissions, reviewer reports, or personal data to public or third-party generative artificial intelligence systems.
8. Publisher’s Responsibilities
Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University safeguards editorial independence and does not allow commercial, institutional, or personal interests to determine editorial decisions. The publisher supports the preservation of journal records and published content, open access, confidentiality, complaints and appeals, and the correction of the scholarly record.
9. Research and Publication Misconduct; Similarity Screening
Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, duplicate or redundant publication, salami slicing, unfair or omitted authorship, citation manipulation, peer-review manipulation, undisclosed conflicts of interest or funding, misuse of confidential information, and failure to comply with ethical approval or consent requirements are unacceptable.
All submissions are screened using similarity-detection software. The Editorial Board has set an upper similarity limit of 20%; manuscripts exceeding this limit may be rejected. A similarity percentage below the limit does not by itself establish originality or ethical compliance. Editors assess the nature, distribution, and sources of overlap and may request clarification, correction, or additional documentation at any stage.
10. Conflicts of Interest and Funding
Authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose financial, institutional, academic, personal, or other relationships that may influence—or reasonably appear to influence—the work or the decision process. Authors must identify all funding sources and the funder’s role. If no conflict or funding exists, this must also be stated.
11. Research Data and Reproducibility
Authors are responsible for preserving the data and records supporting their work. Data should be made available to editors, reviewers, or readers when reasonably possible, subject to participant consent, privacy, confidentiality, intellectual property, institutional rules, and applicable law. Restrictions on access and the location of available data must be explained in a Data Availability Statement. Fabricated, falsified, or improperly manipulated data are grounds for rejection or post-publication action.
12. Artificial Intelligence Use
Artificial intelligence tools cannot be listed as authors because they cannot assume responsibility, approve the final version, or disclose conflicts of interest. Authors must transparently disclose the tool, version, date, and purpose of any generative artificial intelligence use in the Methods, Acknowledgements, or the journal’s declaration section, as appropriate. Routine spelling and grammar checking need not be declared unless it materially changes the content.
Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, citations, confidentiality, and legality of all submitted content. Artificial intelligence must not be used to fabricate or alter research data, results, sources, ethics documents, or images in a misleading manner. Editors and reviewers must protect manuscript confidentiality and must not upload unpublished content or personal data to public generative artificial intelligence systems.
13. Complaints, Appeals, and Allegations
Authors and readers may submit a reasoned appeal, complaint, or allegation of ethical misconduct, together with supporting information, to burdurmakuebed@gmail.com. Submissions are handled confidentially and in accordance with COPE guidance. The editor provides a reasoned response after examining the editorial record. Matters involving the responsible editor are referred to an uninvolved editor, the editorial board, or the publisher. An appeal does not guarantee reversal of the decision.
14. Corrections, Expressions of Concern, and Retractions
Errors that do not invalidate the main findings are corrected through a linked correction notice. Serious but unresolved concerns may lead to an expression of concern. Articles containing unreliable findings, major ethical violations, plagiarism, duplicate publication, or unlawful material may be retracted in accordance with COPE guidance. Notices remain permanently accessible, identify the affected article, explain the reason for the action, and preserve the integrity of the scholarly record.
15. Special Issue Policy
A special issue is an additional issue devoted to a defined scholarly theme or to full papers developed from presentations at a congress, symposium, conference, or similar scientific meeting. It is not a substitute for a regular issue and must not disrupt continuous publication. Special issues may be published only when the number permitted by the TR Dizin rule—no more than one-third of the journal’s regular issues—is satisfied, and in no case more than one special issue may be published in a calendar year.
The journal editor remains responsible for every special issue; a qualified guest editor may be appointed. The theme, scope, guest editor, call, timetable, and selection criteria are announced transparently. The journal’s authorship, ethics, plagiarism screening, double-anonymous peer review, data, artificial intelligence, conflict-of-interest, fee, copyright, license, correction, and retraction policies apply without exception. A guest editor’s or board member’s own submission is handled by an independent editor.
Special issues are clearly labelled and numbered separately from regular issues, and their page numbering is distinct. The distribution of article types is included in the journal’s annual ratios under TR Dizin rules. Commemorative issues are not treated as special issues and, if published, are numbered as regular issues.
16. Policy Review and Contact
This policy is reviewed when national or international standards change. Questions and ethical concerns should be sent to burdurmakuebed@gmail.com. Policy update: 14 August 2026.
17. Repository, Self-Archiving and Digital Preservation Policy
17.1. Purpose and Scope
Mehmet Akif Ersoy University Journal of The Institute of Educational Sciences (MAKÜ-EBED) supports the visibility, accessibility, and long-term usability of scholarly knowledge. This section sets out the principles for depositing and sharing Research Articles and Review Articles accepted or published by the journal. These principles apply together with the journal’s open-access, copyright, and CC BY-NC 4.0 licensing terms.
17.2. Self-Archiving and Deposit Rights
Authors may deposit and make openly accessible the preprint, Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM), and published article (Version of Record) of their own work in institutional, subject-based, or trusted general academic repositories without an embargo. Preprint records must be clearly identified as versions before peer review, and AAM records must be identified as accepted author manuscripts after peer review that are not the published version of record.
17.3. Citation, Linkage, and Version Transparency
Every deposited record must identify the article version clearly. Where a published article is available, the repository record must include the complete article citation, a persistent link to the article page on DergiPark, the İzlik identifier and other persistent identifiers where available, and the CC BY-NC 4.0 license with its link. If a correction, expression of concern, or retraction is published for the version of record, a link to the relevant notice should be added to the repository record as soon as reasonably possible.
17.4. License, Third-Party Material, and Restrictions
Third-party material, figures, data sets, instruments, or other content identified separately in an article may be excluded from the CC BY-NC 4.0 License. Authors are responsible for obtaining any required permissions. Where supplementary files or data cannot be made openly available because of personal data, participant confidentiality, ethics approval conditions, intellectual-property rights, contractual obligations, or applicable law, the reason for the access restriction must be explained. Confidential peer-review materials, unpublished editorial correspondence, and legally restricted content may not be deposited in open repositories.
17.5. Digital Preservation and the Scholarly Record
MAKÜ-EBED articles are published open access on the journal’s official article pages on DergiPark. The journal periodically reviews its long-term digital preservation arrangements with its publisher and infrastructure provider. Once an active, verifiable third-party preservation service is in place, the service name, scope, and verification link will be published in this policy. Until such verification is available, the journal does not claim active preservation by LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, the PKP Preservation Network, Portico, or a service recorded in the Keepers Registry.
17.6. Review of the Policy and Contact
This policy will be reviewed when open-access standards, licensing terms, repository practices, or digital preservation arrangements change. Questions concerning this policy may be directed to the MAKÜ-EBED Editorial Office at burdurmakuebed@gmail.com.