PUBLICATION and ETHICS POLICY of IJSM
International Journal of Secondary Metabolite (IJSM) is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal published electronically and quarterly. The journal aims to improve the research culture and help knowledge spread rapidly in the academic world by providing a common academic platform. IJSM published in the English language. IJSM is available online for free at
https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/ijsm. All manuscripts published in the journal are licensed under CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons license).
All responsibility for the scientific content and statements in an article published in the journal belongs to the authors. IJSM follows strict ethical standards for publication to ensure high-quality scientific publications and trust in research findings. Our publication ethics policy is mainly based on the "Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors" published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (
COPE). IJSM also adheres to the "Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing" jointly published by COPE, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors.
Ethical standards summarized below provide guidelines for editors, reviewers, and authors who contribute to IJSM. For more detailed information on ethical issues, please see the COPE's guidelines.
EDITORS' RESPONSIBILITIES
The crucial role of a journal Editor-in-Chief is to monitor and ensure the peer-review editorial process's fairness, timeliness, thoroughness, and civility.
The editor is responsible for deciding which of the papers submitted to the journal will be published. The decision will be based on the paper's importance, originality, and clarity, and the study's validity, and its relevance to the journal's scope. The primary responsibilities of our editors are:
• Selecting manuscripts suitable for publication while rejecting unsuitable manuscripts,
• Ensuring a supply of high-quality manuscripts to the journal by identifying important "hot topics,"
• Organizing the flow of manuscripts by communicating with the authors, reviewers, and publishers,
• Describing, implementing, and regularly reviewing policies for handling ethical issues and allegations or findings of misconduct by authors and anyone involved in the peer-review process,
• Treating all authors with fairness, courtesy, objectivity, honesty, and transparency,
• Protecting the confidentiality of every author's work,
• Increasing the journal's impact factor and maintaining the publishing schedule,
• Setting up a reliable panel of expert reviewers.
Editors are also responsible for offering feedback to the reviewers when required and ensuring that any feedback to authors is constructive.
CANCELLATIONS/RETURNS
Articles may be returned to authors in order to increase the authenticity and reliability and to prevent ethical breaches, and even if articles have been accepted or published, they can be withdrawn from publication if necessary. The Editors-in-Chief of the journals have the right to return or withdraw articles in the following situations:
• When the article is not within the scope of the journal,
• When plagiarism is detected in the article,
• When there is proof of ruling out the findings obtained by the research,
• When the article is undergoing an assessment or publication process by another journal, congress, conference, etc.,
• When the scientific quality and content of the article does not meet the standards of the journal and a reviewer review is not necessary,
• When the author does not submit the requested documents/materials/data etc. within the requested time,
• When the article was not prepared in compliance with scientific publication ethics,
• When the authors make changes that are not approved by the editor after the article was submitted,
• When the authors do not perform the requested corrections within the requested time,
• When an author is added/removed, the order of the authors is changed, the corresponding author is changed, or the addresses of the authors are changed without the consent of the Editor-in-Chief,
• When data used in the study cannot be provided upon requested.
• When human rights or animal rights are violated,
Confidentiality
The editor and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the editorial board members for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.
REVIEWERS' RESPONSIBILITIES
The peer-reviewing process assists the editor and the editorial board in making editorial decisions and may also serve the author in improving the paper. Promptness: Any selected reviewer who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and withdraw from the review process. Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be disclosed to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.
Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments. Reviewers should identify cases in which relevant published work referred to in the paper has not been cited in the reference section. They should point out whether the respective source accompanies observations or arguments derived from other publications. Reviewers will notify the editor of any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper they have personal knowledge of.
Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions associated with the papers.
AUTHORS' DUTIES
Reporting standards
Authors of original research reports should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.
Data access and retention
Authors could be asked to provide the raw data of their study together with the paper for editorial review. They should be prepared to make the data publicly available if practicable. In any event, authors should ensure accessibility of such data to other competent professionals for at least ten years after publication (preferably via an institutional or subject-based data repository or other data center), provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and legal rights concerning proprietary data do not preclude their release.
Originality, plagiarism, and acknowledgment of sources
Authors will submit only entirely original works and appropriately cite or quote the work and/or words of others. Publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work should also be cited. The similarity report should be uploaded in PDF format using plagiarism software that determines the similarity rates such as iThenticate/Academic Paradigms, LLC-Check For Plagiarism/Grammarly-Plagiarism Checker. The report must be not exceeded the rate of 20%.
Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication
In general, papers describing essentially the same research should not be published in more than one journal. Submitting the same paper to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. Manuscripts that have been published as copyrighted material elsewhere cannot be submitted. In addition, manuscripts under review by the journal should not be resubmitted to copyrighted publications. However, by submitting a manuscript, the author(s) retain the rights to the published material. In case of publication, they permit the use of their work under a CC-BY license [
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode], which means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor.
Authorship of the paper
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. The corresponding author ensures that all contributing co-authors and no uninvolved persons are included in the author list. The corresponding author will also verify that all co-authors have approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
All authors should include a statement disclosing any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that may be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.
Fundamental errors in published works
When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author's obligation to notify the journal editor or publisher promptly and to cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper in the form of an erratum.
REFERENCES
OPEN ACCESS STATEMENT
International Journal of Assessment Tools in Education (IJSM) adheres to the Budapest Open Access Initiative and defines its Open Access policy according to the definition developed in the original BOAI:
By "open access" to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be appropriately acknowledged and cited. [See,
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai-10-recommendations]
IJSM views open access to academic publications and research as an immutable part of academic endeavor. The publisher recognizes the essence of public good provided by the journal and hence accepts its responsibility as a public service to academic and intellectual betterment.
The publisher is committed to open access to all academic endeavors and, as such, accepts its duty to make published content permanently available and freely accessible by all sections of the worldwide academic community. The publisher does not charge any pecuniary fees for the processing, submission, and publication of manuscripts. The publisher commits to free and universal access to its published content in perpetuity.
The publisher, via its host-providing institution Dergipark uses Lockss for the archiving and preservation of its online content.
Authors retain their intellectual property: All articles published on IJSM are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, and the journal does not require a transfer of copyright.
COPYRIGHT
In addition to being available on ISM, authors are encouraged to post any version of their manuscript in their institutional repositories or on their personal websites at any stage of the pre and post-publication process. As an open-access journal, we do not require authors to transfer copyright to IJSM in order to publish in the journal. Authors retain full control of their intellectual property, and we use the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license for all works published in the journal. This means that anyone is free to share this material in any medium or format and that anyone can remix, transform, and build upon the content, as long as they provide attribution to the content creator.
ARCHIVING POLICY
IJSM is accessed via the DergiPark platform, which utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.
PUBLICATION LANGUAGE
IJSM publishes articles written only in English language.
PUBLICATION FREQUENCY
IJSM is published "online" four times a year (quarterly) in March, June, September, and December. If the Editorial Board finds it appropriate, a Special Issue can also be published.
FEE POLICY
All articles accepted to the IJSM are published without any charges for the article submission, review, or printing.
PRIVACY POLICY
Personal information entered into the IJSM site is used only for the specified purposes of this journal, cannot be used or shared for other purposes. This journal is committed to upholding the integrity of the scientific record, and the journal will follow the COPE guidelines on how to deal with potential acts of misconduct.