ETHICAL PRINCIPLES OF THE TCA JOURNAL

The TCA Journal complies with national and international publication ethics standards. Based on the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and the Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Directive of Higher Education Entities published by the Council of Higher Education of Türkiye, the journal adopts the following principles:

Responsibilities of the Editor and Editorial Board

The editors (Executive Editor, Managing Editor, issue editors, and other editors) and the Editorial Board are responsible for ensuring that the manuscripts published in the journal comply with the journal's publication policy and the journal's purpose and scope, and for carrying out the necessary work to raise the journal's quality standards.
The editors and the Editorial Board are responsible for evaluating the studies submitted for publication only in terms of academic competence and scientific originality, regardless of the authors' ethnic origin, nationality, gender, religious beliefs, and political preferences. They maintain confidentiality during the evaluation process.
The editors and the Editorial Board undertake not to have a conflict of interest regarding the accepted or rejected articles and to prioritize academic concerns and criteria in the article acceptance and evaluation processes.
The editors' obligations are to submit articles suitable for their field of expertise to the Editorial Board members and reviewers for evaluation; to ensure that the evaluation processes are carried out in accordance with publication policies, ethical principles, and academic requirements; not to allow any conflict of interest between the editors, Editorial Board members, reviewers, and authors. They ensure that the evaluation processes are completed in an independent and impartial manner.
The editors are responsible for supporting academic diversity of views and scientific freedom of thought, protecting intellectual property rights and ethical standards, and protecting human and animal rights.
The editors are obliged to carry out all processes in accordance with the criteria of accountability and to meet the information requests of the authors and readers. They undertake all kinds of responsibilities regarding legal processes in line with their job descriptions.
The editors' responsibilities are to constantly update the reviewer pool of the journal and to create the most appropriate range; to encourage reviewers to evaluate manuscripts with an impartial, scientific, and objective approach; to remove those reviewers from the reviewer pool who do not return within the deadline or do not comply with the reviewer ethics; and to prevent unethical and offensive reviews before they reach the author.
The editors meticulously take into account the criticisms of the manuscripts published in the journal. They take a constructive attitude in this regard and consider the feedback as an opportunity to increase publication quality.

Responsibilities of the Reviewers

The TCA Journal undertakes to carry out the review process in line with the principles of universal academic publication. For this purpose, the reviewers are expected to act in accordance with the following principles while reviewing the studies that are in the evaluation process:
• The reviewers should make their evaluations with the awareness that they are the basic assurance of the academic quality of the studies to be published in the journal and with the responsibility of increasing academic quality. They should be able to contribute to the editor in the decision-making phase and to the authors in the improvement of the texts.
• The reviewers should only accept requests to review studies for which they have the necessary expertise to make an adequate evaluation.
• The reviewers should complete their evaluations within the time allotted to them. If they cannot accomplish this, they should notify the editor within a reasonable time.
• The reviewers are responsible for evaluating the submitted studies fairly and impartially, notifying the editor of any copyright infringement, plagiarism, and other ethical violations they detect, and maintaining the confidentiality required by the blind reviewer process.
• The reviewers should avoid superficial and vague expressions in their evaluation reports. They should explain in a concrete way the deficiencies and flaws of the studies for which they have negative opinions.
• The reviewers’ reports should be objective and measured. They should only contain academic evaluations made on the text. They should be written in a constructive language. They should avoid making statements about the inadequacies of the authors and harming their personalities.

Responsibilities of the Authors

• The authors should ensure that the studies they submit for publication are original and have not been previously published or sent for publication anywhere, in any language,.
• The compliance of the submitted studies with scientific rules and ethical principles is the responsibility of the authors. The authors should observe the applicable copyright laws and treaties. They should use copyrighted materials with appropriate permission and thanks. They should avoid practices that are against scientific publication ethics (plagiarism, forgery, distortion, republishing, slicing, unfair authorship, not specifying the supporting organization, not complying with ethical rules in studies on animals, etc.). If they receive any financial support during the preparation or publication of the study, they should clearly state this.
• For studies that require ethical committee permission, legal permission, or special permission, the relevant permission document should be submitted by clearly stating from which institution, on which date, and with what decision or number the permission was obtained.
• All sources used should be cited appropriately. All works cited in the text should be included in the bibliography. The works that are not cited should not be included in the bibliography. The citation method through transfer from another source should be used only for works that are not available.
• All authors should have a direct academic and scientific contribution to the submitted studies. The names of those who did not meet the criteria for authorship but contributed to the study should be included in the first page footnote with acknowledgments. The naming order of the authors should be a joint decision of the authors.
• The corresponding author is the author who undertakes the responsibility for the manuscript on behalf of other authors for its submission to the journal, the communication process with the journal, and post-publishing processes. He/she is obliged to inform other authors about the evaluation and publication processes. It is assumed that the corresponding author has reached an agreement with the other authors in the whole process related to the manuscript.
• The authors should comply with the journal's authoring rules. They should submit all kinds of information and documents requested by the reviewer and editor on time. They should meticulously make the desired changes within a reasonable time.

• The authors should disclose any financial relations, conflicts of interest, and competition of interest that may affect the results of the research or scientific evaluation. They are responsible for immediately contacting and cooperating with the editor for correction or retraction if they detect a significant error or inaccuracy during the evaluation process.

PUBLICATION POLICY OF THE TCA JOURNAL

1) The TCA Journal is an open-access, peer-reviewed, international and scientific journal, which is published quarterly by the TCA Presidency. It publishes disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies that are prepared in the fields of public finance, financial law, public administration, public law, and public economy, with a priority on studies related to the audit and judicial functions of TCA.

2) The publication languages of the journal are Turkish and English.

3) The TCA Journal commits to publishing in accordance with academic and ethical principles and standards determined at the national and universal levels, and to preventing practices contrary to these. In this scope, it adopts the ethical publishing principles determined by the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open-access Journals (DOAJ), and the Council of Higher Education. It is essential that all stakeholders of the TCA Journal have the necessary sensitivity about ethical responsibilities and act in line with the TCA Journal’s Ethical Principles.

4) All expenses for the journal are covered by the TCA Presidency. No fee is charged at the stages of acceptance, evaluation, and publication of the articles.

5) The studies submitted to the journal should adhere to the TCA Journal’s Publication Policy, Ethical Principles and Authoring Rules. They should be original and not previously published or sent for publication anywhere.

6) Studies should be submitted together with the relevant forms on Dergipark and should include the titles of the authors, the institutions they work for, their communication addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID, http://orcid.org) number.

7) Submitted studies are subject to plagiarism review (including studies derived from abstracts or fully published papers or dissertations), and the similarity rate should not exceed 20%.

8) Submitted studies are subject to preliminary examination by the editor or the secretariat. In cases where the study is not included in the publication area of the journal, has a high rate of similarity or contains plagiarism, does not comply with ethical principles and authoring rules, and contains excessive authoring errors, the study may be rejected without submitting it to the Editorial Board.

9) Studies that pass the preliminary examination are evaluated by the Editorial Board. Studies that are found suitable in terms of subject, scope, authoring quality, originality, and academic competence are sent to two separate reviewers from different entities. If one of the reviewers expresses a positive opinion and the other a negative opinion, it is sent to a third reviewer or the editor uses discretion.

10) When the reviewers accept to review the articles sent to them, they undertake that they will not use the articles they evaluated for their own benefit, and that they will not share any information or documents related to the article with a third party.

11) The journal is available in print as well as online (open-access). All issues and contents of the journal can be accessed free of charge over the internet in accordance with the policies of the Budapest Open-access Initiative.

12) All texts published in the journal have intellectual property and copyright protection. They may not be reproduced or derived, in whole or in part, for commercial purposes. All contents belonging to the authors are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Non-Derivative 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). According to the Creative Commons Attribution principles, the author acknowledges that the right to publish his/her study for the first time belongs to the TCA Journal. Readers can read, download, save, copy, print, scan, link to the full text, index, export to software, and use the full text of journal articles for non-commercial purposes without obtaining permission from the publisher or author, and for any legal purpose.

13) The fact that it is published in the journal does not mean that the views expressed in the articles are shared by the TCA.

14) The authors whose articles are published are paid royalties in accordance with the "By-Law on Copyright and Processing Fees to be Paid by Public Entities" published in the Official Gazette dated January 23, 2007 and numbered 26412. Five journals are sent free of charge upon request.

15) All kinds of communication with the journal management (including communicating the opinions, suggestions, and criticisms) can be made via the address dergi@sayistay.gov.tr.