Policies and Ethics
HJBC is committed to maintaining the highest standards of publication ethics and to supporting ethical research practices and strictly adheres to the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers. We encourage journal editors to follow the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Editors and to refer reviewers to the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers as appropriate.
Author Responsibilities
• Articles submitted for publication should not be contrary to the ethics of scientific publications (plagiarism, falsification, distortion, republishing, slicing, unfair authorship, not specifying the supporting organization, not following ethical rules in animal studies, etc.).
• The authors should obtain Ethics Committee Permission for required studies such as conducted with qualitative or quantitative approaches that require data collection from participants using questionnaires, interviews, focus group work, observation, experimentation, clinical trials on humans or animals. The authors should obtain and specify permission from the owners for the use of scales, surveys and photographs.
• Any changes in authorship prior to or after publication must be agreed upon by all authors, including those being added or removed. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to obtain confirmation from all co-authors and to provide evidence of this to the editorial office with a full explanation about why the change is necessary.
• All authors of a paper should agree on the corresponding author and the order of the co-authors, and check affiliations and contact details before submitting.
• A corresponding author should inform the editor if they want to withdraw their paper from the journal with the consent of the other authors of the paper.
• All authors of a paper should have the ability and responsibility to publicly defend their paper.
• An author should provide the dataset if it is required in review process by the reviewers.
• The authors should declare the competing interest in their cover letters or on the manuscript submission form in the journal’s online peer review system.
• All manuscripts should be well-written in English. Papers below the standard for HJBC will be sent back to the authors for rewriting and can be rejected for this reason alone.
• After acceptance of a paper, the author should follow the writing rules of HJBC and use the HJBC style files.
• An author should not share his/her paper with HJBC logo during the review process in any platforms.
Editor Responsibilities
• The editor of a learned journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal shall be published. Based on the review report, the editor has complete responsibility and authority to accept, reject or request modifications to the manuscript.
• The editor is guided by policies of the journal’s editorial board and constrained by legal requirements regarding issues such as libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.
• The editor shall evaluate manuscripts and should make decisions to accept or reject a paper for publication based only on the paper’s importance, originality and clarity, and the study’s relevance to the remit of the journal. Research papers must be reviewed by at least two external and independent reviewers. If necessary, the editor should seek further opinions.
• The editor should ensure that each manuscript submitted to HJBC is evaluated for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, citizenship, religious belief, or political philosophy of the authors.
• The editor is responsible for ensuring that material submitted to HJBC remains confidential while under review.
• The editor should ensure that peer review is fair, unbiased and undertaken in a timely fashion so that authors do not experience undue delays.
• The editor shall not use unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript for his/her own research without the written consent of the author.
• The editor should take responsive measures when the incidence of misconduct have been reported concerning the integrity of 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, but may also include further communications to the relevant institutions and research bodies.
• The editor must not be involved in decisions about papers which he/she has written him/herself or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest.
• Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be approved by the editor.
Reviewer Responsibilities
• Reviewers should not contact the author(s) of the paper that they accepted to review.
• Reviewers should keep the ideas and findings of the paper received for review confidential. The paper should not be shared with others and also should not be used by the reviewers in their own research works.
• Reviewers should evaluate the papers objectively and professionally. Reviews should be well-written which benefit the authors so that they can use them to improve their works.
• If a selected reviewer thinks that he/she is not qualified on the subjects of the paper, he/she should inform the editor and excuse himself/herself from the review process.
• Reviewers should fill in the “Evaluation form for the referees” with the explanatory, detailed arguments supporting their final decisions.
• Reviewers should complete the referee report within the period given by the journal. If a reviewer thinks that he/she will not be able to complete the report on time, then he/she should inform the editor.
• If there is a potential conflict of interest, the reviewer should report this to the editor.
• Reviewers should inform the editor if they think that the paper has some ethical problems like duplication or plagiarism.
In preparation of “Policies and Ethics of HJBC” the below sources have been used.
1. Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Code of conduct guidelines and requirements for peer reviewed journals, https://publicationethics.org
2. https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/publishing-ethics.
Copyright
The copyright of an article is transferred to HJBC, if and when the article is accepted for publication. A copyright permission is obtained for materials published elsewhere and which require this permission for reproduction.
December 31, 2025
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