Ethical Principles and Ethical Rules of the Journal
Our journal adheres to the international standards and COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and publishes items by referring to them.
ETHICAL GUIDELINES
Guidelines for the Editors
An editor (editors, associate editors, etc.) should provide impartial consideration to all manuscripts offered for publication, judging each on its particular feature without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the author(s). An editor should review and treat a manuscript submitted for publication with all reasonable speed. An editor takes the sole responsibility for accepting or rejecting a manuscript for publication. An editor may seek assistance on a manuscript from specialists chosen for their expertise and fair judgment. An editor should not reveal any information about the manuscript under consideration to anyone other than the author and designated reviewers until after the evaluation process is complete. An editor should respect the intellectual independence of authors.
Authors
Our journal considers a person as an author who is responsible at least for a part of the work. Authors should be able to explain the problem in study in a deep manner. For our journal, all authors are responsible for the content they submitted. The corresponding author is responsible for the agreement of all the authors and to keep them informed about the submission process since first submission of their manuscript. He/she is responsible for providing the license to publish, in case of acceptance, on behalf of all the authors. Our journal assumes that submitting the paper implies in total agreement from all the authors. For manuscripts with more than 8 authors, all the authors should provide a declaration specifying what was their contribution to the manuscript. It is not acceptable for JOTCS-C to consider for publication anything that was previously published, neither entirely nor partly, in other journals. Anything sent to our journal must not be under analysis by anywhere else. Simultaneous submissions to JOTCS-C and any other journal, is considered a major conduct flaw, and all the authors will be definitely banned, and all their previous publications in JOTCS-C will be publicly retracted. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism will be treated in the same way. Multiple manuscripts, dealing with closely related subjects and/or variables are discouraged as long as they could figure in a single paper.
Reviewers
JOTCS-C invites peers to review its submissions, relying on their expertise, curricula, and their will to review them as volunteers. By accepting to review a manuscript, the reviewer commits himself to do so in due time. Delays are extremely negative to the review process and makes it last much longer than it should. When a reviewer is requested, he/she is gently asked to answer the invitation e-mail, informing if he/she is willing or not willing to review the manuscript. It is a gesture of politeness, and it avoids delays too. By accepting to review a manuscript, the reviewer declares that no conflicts of interests do exist, and he/she is doing his/her revision for the wealth and progress of Science. Those reviewers who answer our requests, agreeing or not, and those who respect the deadlines, are scored positively, and eventual submissions they could send to JOTCSA will be treated with priority.
Journal’s Publication Policy
Our journal does not require any kinds of payments such as page charges, article processing costs, or others. The journal uses a double-blind peer review policy for evaluating articles. The author submits their material, a secretary makes an initial evaluation about it and decides if the article is eligible for further action, or a refusal is issued. Same applies to any article whose similarity score by iThenticate is higher than 31%. The author is welcomed if they decide to resubmit the material after considerable reviewing. When the article is accepted for peer review, the editor-in-chief decides who will be the reviewers, and passes the article file to them. The editor calls forth at least two reviewers, who are experts in the field, and waits for their evaluation. The editor gathers the evaluations from the reviewers, makes a brief list concerning the reviewers’ recommendations, and sends to the author, along with the decision about the article (acceptance, minor revision, major revision, rejection). The author receives the report and starts working, making responses and sends the revised article and the processed report. In some cases, the editor makes enough data and does not need to send the revised material to the reviewers. If this is not the case, the reviewers comment about the revision made and make their final decision. There are rare cases in which a revised manuscript needs additional revision sessions and the process starts again. After the revisions, the manuscript is most probably accepted and is passed to the Copyeditor, who examines the usage of English and Turkish and makes corrections on the article. They pass the copyedited article to the Layout Editor, who creates the final look and feel of the manuscript, and the final PDF file. The final PDF file is returned to the corresponding author for proofreading and when required, a list of correction is received. The PDF file is corrected and marked as ready-to-publish, the short name of the PDF file is set, the reference list is controlled, the list of authors is checked and ORCID ID’s are entered. As a last step, the title, abstract, publication date, and page range are checked and DOI name is requested. If everything is smooth, the journal system allows the applicant to have a DOI name, then the article is registered to a journal issue, the order is set, and the process approved. The article is published and can be seen in the journal website. If there are still something to be corrected, the process begins again and the corrected article PDF is substituted for the old one.
The time required for evaluation of a manuscript changes from article to article; however, it takes an average of four months to get a result. Exceptions occur where a reviewer responds too quickly, or the author prepares the report just some days after they receive it. In these cases, the evaluation takes only one or two months. On the other hand, the delays from reviewers and authors, one reason of which is capturing the e-mail by junk mail filters and they could not be aware of the development, therefore a great lagging is experienced. A similar reason is that the reviewer’s or author’s e-mail address is blocked or over quota, so the message is never received.
The author is free to withdraw their article only in the pre-control stage.
Please be advised,
Prof. Dr. Canan NAKİBOĞLU
Editor-in-chief, JOTCS-C
March 31, 2022
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