Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education is a peer-reviewed, electronic, and scientific journal which adheres to the following ethical principles and considerations in order to publish high quality objective articles in the field of special education about children at risk, children with developmental delays, and children with and without special needs. Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education is a free access electronic journal in which a double blind review process is conducted. Following are the ethical responsibilities, roles and duties of authors, editor(s), reviewers, and the publisher. This publication ethics and malpractice statement is written according to the guidelines of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Moreover, plagiarism and unethical behaviors according to Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education are included here.

Authors

The authors should submit their original works to the Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education in the field of special education about the topics related to children at risk, children with developmental delays, and children with and without special needs.

Any work of other sources (authors, online pages, personal interviews etc.) should be properly and accurately referenced.

The authors must indicate that the manuscript has not been submitted to any other journals and they must fill in the form of “Copyright Release.”

Individuals who have not intellectually contributed to the manuscripts should not be indicated as authors.

If there are conflicting interests or relations in the manuscripts submitted, these must be declared and explained.

The authors could be asked to supply raw data related to their manuscripts during the review process, they must provide the raw data required to the editorial board. The authors are supposed to keep data of a published article at least for 5 years.

If the authors identify mistakes in their studies, they should inform the editor or the editorial board and cooperate with the process of correction or withdrawal.

Reviewers

All the manuscripts submitted to the Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education are reviewed in a double blind review process. It means that both the authors and the reviewers are kept confidential to ensure unbiased, objective, and independent review process.  The reviewers are asked to assign manuscripts through journal management system on DergiPark. The reviewers are asked to fill in a form about the contribution of the manuscript to the special education field and their final decision about the manuscript whether or not to be published and the reasons. The ethical responsibilities and roles of the reviewers of our journal are as follows:

The reviewers must only agree to review manuscripts which align with their expertise.

The reviewers must only review manuscripts which they do not have any conflict of interests. If they notice any conflict of interest they should inform the editor about it and decline to be a reviewer to the related manuscript.

The reviewers must review the manuscripts in unbiased and objective manner.

The reviewers must include the form of Research Article Evaluation Form, Single Subject Research Article Evaluation Form or Review Article Evaluation Form without indicating their names to protect the blind review process. And they should include their final decision about the manuscript whether or not it should be published and why.

The suggestions and tone of the reviews should be polite, courteous and scientific. The reviewers should avoid including hostile, disrespectful, and subjective personal comments. When these comments are detected they could be reviewed and returned to the reviewer to be revised by the editor or editorial board.

The reviewers should respond in time when a manuscript is submitted to them to be reviewed and they should adhere to the ethical responsibilities declared hereby.

Editor

The editor should adhere to the following ethical responsibilities based on guidelines of "COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors" and "COPE Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors" published as open Access by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

The editor is responsible for the articles published. The editor’s ethical duties and responsibilities are as follows:

General responsibilities

The editor should make the efforts to improve the quality of and contribute to the development of the journal.

The editor should support authors’ freedom of expression.

Relations with readers

The editor should ensure that the non-peer-reviewed sections of the journal (letters, essays, announcements of conferences etc.) are clearly identified.

The editor should make efforts to ensure that the articles published align with the knowledge and skills of the readers.

Relations with the reviewers

The editor should match the knowledge and expertise of the reviewers with the manuscripts submitted to them to be reviewed ensuring that the manuscripts are adequately reviewed by qualified reviewers. 

The editor should require reviewers to disclose any potential competing interests before agreeing to review a submission.

The editor should provide necessary information about the review process to the reviewers about what is expected of them.

The editor must ensure that the review process is double blind and never reveal the identities of the authors to the reviewers or vice versa.

The editor should evaluate reviewers in terms of performance and timing.

The editor should develop a database of suitable reviewers and update it on the basis of reviewer performance.

The editor should cease to use reviewers who continuously produce impolite, poor quality or late reviews.

The editor should try to enlarge reviewer pool with new reviewers in terms of reviewers’ expertise.

Relations with the authors:

The editor should provide clear publication guidelines and a template of what is expected of them to the authors and continuously review the guidelines and templates.

The editor should review the manuscript submitted in terms of guidelines of the journal, importance of the study, and originality and if the decision to reject the manuscript is made editor should explain it to the authors with clear and unbiased way. If the decision is made that the manuscript should be revised by the authors in terms of written language, punctuation, and/or rules in the guidelines (spacing, proper referencing, etc.) the authors should be notified and given time to do the corrections accordingly.

The editor should provide submission and acceptance dates on the manuscripts.

The authors should be provided with necessary information about the process of their review (at which stage is the manuscript at etc.) complying with the rules of double blind review.

Relations with editorial board members:

Editor should provide publication guidelines to the new editorial board members and explain what is expected of them.

Editor should ensure that the editorial board members have the recently updated publication guidelines and policies.

Editor should review the editorial board members and include members who can actively contribute to the journal’s development.

Editorial board members should be informed about their roles and responsibilities such as

-          Supporting development of the journal

-          Accepting to write reviews in their expertise when asked

-          Reviewing publication guidelines and improving them consistently

-          Taking responsibility in journal’s operation

Publisher

Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education is published by Ankara University. Ethical responsibilities of the publisher are as follows:

The publisher acknowledges that the decision making process and the review process are the responsibility of the editor of the Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education.

The publisher provides free electronic allocation of the content of the journal on the web page of the university’s library page: http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/detail.php?id=39

Plagiarism and unethical behavior

All manuscripts submitted to Ankara University Faculty of Educational Sciences Journal of Special Education are reviewed through iThenticate software before publishing. The maximum similarity rate accepted is 15-20% (Shafer, 2011). Manuscripts which exceed these limits are analyzed in detail and if deemed necessary returned to the authors for revision or correction, if not they could be rejected to be published if any plagiarism or unethical behavior is detected.

Following are some of the behaviors which are accepted as unethical:

-          Indicating individuals who have not intellectually contributed to the manuscripts as authors.

-          Not indicating individuals who have intellectually contributed to the manuscripts as authors.

-          Not indicating that a manuscript was produced from author’s graduate thesis/dissertation or that the manuscript included was produced from a project’s data.

-          Salami slicing, producing more than one article from a single study.

-          Not declaring conflicting interests or relations in the manuscripts submitted.

-          Unveiling double blind process.

Reference: Shafer, S. L. (2011). You will be caught. Anesthesia & Analgesia, 112(3), 491-493.