Marine Science and Environmental Research is committed to maintaining high standards of publication ethics, scientific integrity, transparency, and editorial independence. The journal follows the principles and recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and is guided by internationally recognized principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing. All parties involved in the publication process—including authors, editors, reviewers, and the publisher—are expected to comply with these principles.
1. Publication Ethics
Submitted manuscripts must represent original work and must not be simultaneously under consideration by another journal.
Previous dissemination of the work as a thesis, conference abstract, conference presentation that does not constitute prior full publication, or preprint does not prevent submission to the journal. Authors must disclose any relevant prior dissemination at the time of submission and provide the corresponding reference, DOI, or URL where applicable. Material that has already been published as a full-length article or substantially equivalent publication will not normally be considered for publication.
Any form of scientific or publication misconduct, including but not limited to plagiarism, data fabrication, data falsification, inappropriate data or image manipulation, duplicate or redundant publication, inappropriate authorship, citation manipulation, peer-review manipulation, and undisclosed competing interests, is considered unethical.
When suspected misconduct is identified, the journal will assess the matter in accordance with COPE principles. The editors may request explanations or supporting documentation and, where appropriate, contact the authors’ institution or other relevant authority. Depending on the circumstances, editorial action may include rejection, correction, expression of concern, or retraction.
Editorial decisions are made independently of institutional, administrative, commercial, or other external influence.
2. Authorship
Authorship should be limited to individuals who have made substantial intellectual contributions to the work.
To qualify for authorship, individuals should:
- Make substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data;
- Participate in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
- Approve the final version to be published;
- Agree to be accountable for the accuracy and integrity of the work.
Individuals who contributed to the study but do not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged appropriately.
All authors must approve the content of the manuscript, its submission to the journal, and the order of authorship before submission.
Multi-authored manuscripts must include an Author Contributions Statement specifying the individual contributions of each author.
Any request to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission must include a clear explanation for the requested change and written agreement from all affected authors. Such changes require approval from the Editor-in-Chief. Changes in authorship after acceptance will be considered only in exceptional and adequately justified circumstances.
The journal does not adjudicate authorship disputes. When authors cannot reach agreement, the matter may be referred to the relevant institution or institutions.
3. Originality and Plagiarism
Authors must ensure that submitted manuscripts are original and that all sources of information, ideas, data, text, figures, and other materials are appropriately acknowledged and cited.
Submissions may be screened using similarity-detection software. The journal applies an overall similarity threshold of 20%, excluding the reference list and properly quoted material. However, similarity reports are assessed in context, and the nature and source of the identified overlap are considered when determining whether plagiarism or inappropriate text recycling has occurred.
Manuscripts containing plagiarism, inappropriate text recycling, unattributed material, or other forms of unacceptable duplication may be rejected or, if already published, subject to appropriate post-publication action.
Authors, reviewers, and editors must not request or encourage unnecessary citations for the purpose of increasing citations to particular authors, articles, journals, or institutions.
4. Data Integrity and Research Transparency
Authors are expected to present their methods, data, analyses, and results accurately and transparently. Fabrication, falsification, selective reporting, or misleading manipulation of data is unacceptable.
Authors should retain the underlying data and supporting documentation associated with their study for an appropriate period and make them available to the editors when reasonably required for editorial or ethical assessment.
Where appropriate, research data should be deposited in recognized disciplinary, institutional, or general-purpose repositories, and persistent identifiers such as DOIs or accession numbers should be provided.
Manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement indicating, as applicable, whether:
- The data are publicly available in a specified repository;
- The data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request;
- Access to the data is restricted for ethical, legal, confidentiality, conservation, or other justified reasons;
- No new data were generated or analyzed in the study.
For studies involving nucleotide or protein sequences, genetic data, environmental DNA (eDNA), or other data for which established discipline-specific repositories are available, authors should deposit relevant data in an appropriate repository and provide accession numbers where applicable.
5. Ethical Approval for Research
Studies involving humans, animals, protected species, or regulated field sampling must comply with applicable institutional, national, and international ethical and legal requirements.
Research involving human participants must receive approval from an appropriate ethics committee or institutional review board where required. Authors must provide the name of the approving body, approval number, and date. Informed consent must be obtained where applicable. Consent for publication must also be obtained when identifiable personal information, images, or other identifying material are included.
Research involving animals must comply with applicable animal welfare legislation and institutional ethical requirements. Where ethical approval is required, authors must provide the name of the approving committee, approval number, and date.
Research involving endangered, threatened, protected, or otherwise regulated species must comply with applicable conservation legislation and permitting requirements. Authors are responsible for obtaining all necessary research, sampling, collection, transport, or other relevant permits and authorizations.
Where formal ethical approval or permits are not required for a particular study, authors should provide an appropriate statement explaining this where relevant.
6. Competing Interests and Funding
Authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose any financial, institutional, personal, professional, or other relationships that could reasonably be perceived as influencing the conduct, evaluation, interpretation, or publication of the work.
All manuscripts must include a separate Declaration of Competing Interests before the References section.
If no competing interests exist, the following statement may be used:
Declaration of Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests that could have influenced the work reported in this manuscript.
If competing interests exist, they must be disclosed clearly and completely.
All manuscripts must include a separate Funding statement. Authors should provide the full official name of each funding organization and the grant number, where applicable. If no specific funding was received, this must be stated explicitly.
Failure to disclose relevant competing interests may result in rejection or appropriate post-publication action.
7. Peer Review Process
All manuscripts submitted to Marine Science and Environmental Research undergo an initial editorial assessment to determine their suitability for the journal, compliance with submission requirements, and adherence to basic scientific and ethical standards.
Manuscripts that pass the initial assessment are evaluated through a double-blind peer-review process, in which the identities of authors and reviewers are concealed from one another.
Each manuscript is normally reviewed by at least two independent external reviewers in the relevant field.
Where reviewer reports differ substantially, the editor may seek clarification or invite an additional reviewer. Revised manuscripts may be returned to the original reviewers when further expert assessment is considered necessary.
The final editorial decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief or a designated editor on the basis of the reviewers’ evaluations, scientific and methodological quality, originality, ethical integrity, and relevance to the journal’s scope. Reviewer recommendations inform the editorial decision but do not determine it.
Editorial decisions are independent of the authors’ institutional affiliation, nationality, personal characteristics, or other factors unrelated to the scientific and ethical quality of the manuscript.
8. Responsibilities of Reviewers
Reviewers are expected to:
- Provide objective, constructive, evidence-based, and timely evaluations;
- Treat manuscripts and all associated materials as confidential;
- Evaluate manuscripts impartially;
- Disclose any competing interests that could affect their evaluation;
- Decline review assignments when they lack appropriate expertise or cannot provide an unbiased assessment;
- Identify relevant published work that has not been appropriately acknowledged;
- Refrain from requesting unnecessary citations to their own work or to particular journals;
- Refrain from using unpublished information obtained through peer review for personal or professional advantage;
- Inform the editors if they identify or suspect plagiarism, duplicate publication, data manipulation, undisclosed competing interests, or other ethical concerns.
Reviewers must not share unpublished manuscripts, figures, data, supplementary files, or other confidential material with unauthorized individuals or upload such material to external AI systems or other third-party services where confidentiality cannot be assured.
9. Responsibilities of Editors
Editors are responsible for maintaining the fairness, confidentiality, quality, independence, and integrity of the editorial process.
Editors must:
- Evaluate manuscripts on scholarly merit without discrimination;
- Preserve the confidentiality of submitted material and the identities of authors and reviewers as required by the double-blind review process;
- Select appropriately qualified and independent reviewers;
- Identify and manage competing interests;
- Refrain from using unpublished information obtained through the editorial process for personal or professional advantage;
- Take appropriate action when credible ethical concerns are raised;
- Protect the integrity of the scholarly record.
Editors must recuse themselves from handling manuscripts when financial, personal, professional, institutional, or other relationships could compromise, or reasonably appear to compromise, their impartiality.
Manuscripts submitted by editors or editorial board members must be handled by another qualified editor who has no relevant competing interest. The submitting editor or board member must not participate in reviewer selection or the editorial decision.
The same principle applies when an editor has a close collaborative, supervisory, personal, or other relationship with an author that could affect impartiality.
10. Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern
The journal is committed to maintaining the accuracy and integrity of the scholarly record.
When significant problems are identified after publication, the journal may issue:
- Corrections when an error affects part of an article but does not invalidate its principal findings;
- Retractions when the findings are unreliable because of major error, fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, duplicate publication, unethical research, or other serious reasons;
- Expressions of Concern when serious questions concerning the reliability or integrity of an article remain unresolved or an investigation is ongoing.
Retraction is not limited to cases of deliberate misconduct and may also be necessary when serious unintentional errors render the findings unreliable.
Correction, retraction, and expression-of-concern notices will be clearly identified and linked to the original article. The scholarly record will be preserved whenever possible.
Published articles will not ordinarily be removed from the journal website. Removal may be considered only in exceptional circumstances involving legal requirements, serious privacy concerns, security issues, or substantial risks of harm.
All post-publication actions will be carried out in accordance with relevant COPE guidance.
11. Copyright, Open Access, and Licensing
Authors retain the copyright to their published articles. Authors grant the Publisher a non-exclusive right to publish the work.
All articles are published with immediate open access and without an embargo period under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.
Under CC BY 4.0, users may copy, share, distribute, reproduce, adapt, and build upon published material for any purpose, including commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and source, the license is identified, and any changes made to the original material are indicated.
Authors may deposit and share their submitted manuscripts, accepted manuscripts, and published Versions of Record in institutional or subject repositories, personal websites, or other scholarly platforms. Authors should ensure that any sharing of submitted manuscripts does not compromise the integrity of the double-blind peer-review process. When the Version of Record is shared, the published article and DOI should be cited. No embargo period applies to self-archiving.
Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce third-party copyrighted material when permission is required. Third-party material that is not covered by the article’s CC BY 4.0 license must be clearly identified by an appropriate credit line.
Copyright and licensing information must be displayed clearly on the journal website and on published articles.
12. Post-Publication Discussion and Responsible Scientific Communication
The journal supports transparent, reproducible, and responsible scientific communication.
Readers, authors, and other members of the scientific community may bring substantive concerns regarding published articles to the attention of the editorial office.
Where appropriate, the journal may invite authors to respond to concerns and may publish corrections, responses, expressions of concern, or other notices necessary to preserve the accuracy and transparency of the scholarly record.
Authors are encouraged to provide sufficient methodological detail and, where appropriate, make protocols, supplementary materials, analysis code, and other supporting resources accessible to facilitate verification and reproducibility.
Post-publication discussion must remain evidence-based, professional, and relevant to the scientific content or integrity of the publication.
13. Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools
Artificial intelligence tools, including Large Language Models (LLMs), cannot be listed as authors because they cannot assume responsibility or accountability for scholarly work.
Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, and final content of their manuscripts.
The use of AI tools must be disclosed in the Methods section, or another appropriate section when a Methods section is not available, when such tools contribute to content generation, analysis, interpretation, coding, image generation or modification, or other substantive aspects of the work.
Disclosure is not required when AI tools are used solely for routine copy editing, including improvements to readability, grammar, spelling, punctuation, tone, minor wording, or formatting, provided that the intellectual content remains under the control and responsibility of the authors.
Editors and reviewers must preserve manuscript confidentiality and must not upload unpublished manuscripts, reviewer reports, figures, data, or other confidential editorial material to external AI systems where confidentiality, intellectual property, or data protection cannot be assured.
14. Complaints and Appeals
The journal provides a mechanism for authors, reviewers, readers, and other interested parties to raise complaints concerning editorial conduct, peer review, publication ethics, or journal procedures.
Authors may appeal an editorial decision when they believe that a substantive error has occurred in the evaluation or handling of their manuscript.
Appeals must provide a clear, specific, and evidence-based explanation of the grounds for reconsideration. An appeal does not guarantee reversal of the original decision.
Where possible, an appeal will be evaluated by an editor who was not solely responsible for the original decision. Additional independent expert advice may be sought when necessary.
Complaints will be handled confidentially and fairly. A person who is the subject of a complaint must not be solely responsible for adjudicating that complaint.
Complaints involving the Editor-in-Chief will be referred to an appropriate independent authority within the journal or publisher structure.
Repeated appeals based solely on disagreement with reviewer recommendations or editorial judgment, without substantive new evidence, need not be reconsidered.
Complaints and appeals should be submitted through the journal’s designated contact channel. The journal will handle complaints and appeals in accordance with relevant COPE principles.
By submitting a manuscript to Marine Science and Environmental Research, authors confirm that they have read and agreed to these Ethical Principles and Publication Policy provisions and that their submission complies with all applicable ethical, legal, and editorial requirements.
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