Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society, Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C)
General Principles of Publication
• Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society, Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C) accepts APA 7th version article preparation rules. The journal does not accept any articles that do not comply with the writing rules of the journal.
• Submitted works must not be previously published or sent for evaluation elsewhere. If an article was declared to be published elsewhere or it is determined so, the journal does not accept the publication of it. If an article is published although it was published elsewhere, for it was not declared or determined, the author(s) fully assumes the legal responsibility for the copyright permissions.
• The corresponding author must register at the journal website by following this link before submitting their article(s). After registering, this link allows them to start the 5-step submission process. The corresponding author is informed about the safe arrival of the submissions.
• The corresponding author should enter all authors’ ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) names in the article submission stage. If an author does not have their ORCID, they can obtain it, free of charge, at https://orcid.org.
• Journal editor and assistants examine the submissions first. At this stage, the editor or their assistants may return a submission that does not comply technically or are not suitable in terms of scope. Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C) uses iThenticate software for detecting and preventing possible plagiarism cases. If the score is lower than 25%, the article is accepted for peer review. If not, the article is returned to the authors.

The overlap rate can be 30% in the case of statements such as outcomes/learning outcomes, objectives of the curriculum, issues to be considered in its implementation, etc., directly quoted in studies conducted on curriculums and textbooks using the document review method, and statements that are compulsory to be quoted in textbooks.

• At any rate, if the author(s) want to cancel publication in the journal, they can withdraw their article(s) without stipulation as long as their article(s) do(es) not reach the reviewing stage. After the reviewer reports reach the author(s), it is not possible to withdraw the article(s).
• After passing the preliminary examination, the editor sends the article(s) to two reviewers that are experts in the topic. Reviewing time is 20 days. If both reviewers decide that the article(s) may be published and then the editor decides so, the journal accepts the article(s) for publication. If a reviewer gives a negative report, the editor may reject the article or send it to a third reviewer. If the text needs a revision, the reviewer sends a bulleted list about the corrections to the author(s). The reviewer expects that the author(s) prepare another bulleted list by answering every query in the original list. The reviewer must complete their reviewing task by filling out the reviewing form that was sent by the editor. Without this, it is not possible to advance to the editing stage if the article is accepted.
• In the article evaluation stage, reviewers examine possible similarities in the literature, and conduct a language check (corrections are to be performed by the copyeditor; the reviewer does not need to tackle with corrections. They only need to report the language level). The reviewer(s) only prepare a bulleted report about the changes they require and send it to the author(s). All change requests from the editor or reviewer(s) should be completed by authors in 20 days and submitted to the article evaluation page.
• The corrected article may be forwarded to the reviewer(s) requesting that change and they may look at the article again, yielding an acceptance, rejection, or re-revision.
• Author(s) may not change the finalized version in any way.
• Author(s) are responsible for ideas declared in the article and the correctness of references.
• Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C) owns the copyright of the articles accepted for publication. The journal licenses the article(s) with CC-BY. According to this license, people who are interested in this work may share and adapt it by acknowledging the original work and declaring if they use the original work with modifications (listing the modifications)
• As seen in the privacy statement, the journal never uses the credentials and e-mail addresses for other purposes.
• It is suitable for research libraries to add this journal to their electronic journal collection.
• The author(s) may use the articles published in the Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C), before and after publication on their websites and institutional archives by giving references that are suitable to the rules of librarianship.
• Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C) adopts immediate open access to the contents, as it believes that submitting scientific researches to the public domain free of charge increases the global sharing of information.
• Author(s) submitting their work(s) to Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C) have accepted the conditions below:
a. The author(s) may conduct other contract arrangements, delivery without full authorization (like submission to a corporate database and publishing in a book).
b. The author(s) is/are encouraged to share their work before submission to a journal or during evaluation to an Internet resource (for example, corporate database, websites); this allows a fruitful exchange of ideas and early citation acquisition of the work (see Effect of Open Access)
c. Copyediting procedure aims to develop clarity, understandability, grammatic structure, choice of words, and overall format. Now is the last chance for the author(s) to change essential things in their article; because after this step, the management only performs typesetting and format-related changes. The file that is under copyediting is in MS Word .doc/.docx or Libreoffice Writer .odt format, the respective word processors, may be used efficiently.
d. Here, we recommend the following approach: Kindly use the Track Changes feature of the word processor of your choice (CTRL+SHIFT+E for Microsoft Word, CTRL+SHIFT+C for LibreOffice Writer). However, if this method is selected, the author(s), copyeditor, and editor should access the software.
e. When the track changes feature is activated, the copyeditor may perform the corrections they require. The added text is on the right margin, in a different color, deleted portions of the text are overlined, colored, or deleted. The copyeditor may type in their queries to the editor or author(s) enclosed in square brackets. After the copyeditor finishes their work, they upload it to the journal website for the editor. The editor looks at the text and passes it to the author(s). The editor and author(s) confirm the changes they approve and make it look like regular text, change accordingly, or make the new colored text of change or deletion. If there are queries enclosed in square brackets, the author(s) and editor should respond to them inside that brackets. The copyeditor has a final look at the text under the evaluations of the author(s) and editor, approves the changes, and makes it ready for layout editing.

Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C)
Instructions for Authors

The journal accepts the articles prepared by consideration of the following rules of article writing and the article template into the reviewing phase. Please use the Turkish Template or English Template, and send your work to the Journal website.
• The publication languages of the Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C: Chemical Education (JOTCS-C) are Turkish and English.
• The authors should prepare their work, including the Appendices section, 7,000 words for quantitative studies, 9,000 words for qualitative studies, and 11,000 words for composite ordered studies.
• The authors should check that the tables, figures, images, and graphics should fit into the page, and referencing should comply with APA-7 style. If needed, tables, figures, pictures, graphics, and related objects may use smaller fonts and single paragraph spacing.
• The article must contain an introduction, method, findings, result and discussion, and suggestions sections (consult the article template).
• In the methods section, the author(s) must include research design/model, population, and sample according to the type of work, workgroups or participants, data gathering instruments, analysis of data, and related headings.
• For review articles, the author(s) must present the problem, efficiently analyze the related literature, and provide suggestions for practitioners and researchers.
• The authors must declare the suitability to ethical compliances and related permissions (name of the council, date, issue number) in this section.
• While the author(s) upload the article file to the system, they must be sure to delete the authors’ identities or footnotes that might reveal their identities.
• The JOTCS-C Copyright Transfer Form must be filled in and uploaded to the system.

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