Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section A: Chemistry

Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society, Section A: Chemistry (JOTCSA) is an open-access and peer-reviewed publication of the Turkish Chemical Society. Our aim is to serve the chemical community with a high-quality open-access journal without requesting any fees in the form of page charges, article processing charges, and so on.

Our journal accepts all papers provided that they are in a field of chemistry. The fields include, but not limited to, analytical chemistry, biochemistry, computational chemistry, electrochemistry, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, and physical chemistry. 

The article writing rules for JOTCSA are fairly simple and are explained in the article template below. Downloading the article template file is highly recommended. Most of the issues are outlined in the template file.

Please note that we have adopted a new heading system with numbers, starting from 10(1). Please check the article template below.

Additional Information of the Guide for the Authors, for Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society, Section A: Chemistry (JOTCSA)

The journal management requires that all authors (not only the corresponding author) register to ORCID at https://orcid.org/register and get a free ORCID ID. The registration process takes about only a minute. The corresponding author will complete the document of ORCID ID and e-mail addresses for editorial use. CTRL-clicking on the ORCID image next to the author name will enable the reader to view the ORCID profile of the given author.

We prefer that the authors use "Zotero" (https://www.zotero.org/, free of charge) or "Endnote" (https://www.endnote.com/, commercial), or similar online software like Mendeley (https://www.mendeley.com/?interaction_required=true, free of charge), for the generation of bibliographic list and citations. We are using the "Vancouver" citation style, which is available in all softwares mentioned above. After preparation of the article, please use the "convert citations to text" feature of the reference manager you use.

We are using iThenticate plagiarism solution and our maximum allowed score for the document is 30%. Higher scores are not allowed and the author will be given the plagiarism report and the manuscript will be returned to the authors. Whenever possible, the author is recommended to work with article editing firms to lower the score.

Please do not submit PDF copies of your articles for preliminary control. We accept Microsoft DOC, Microsoft DOCX, and LibreOffice ODT. We directly work on the manuscript, forming changes that are trackable.

Please do not submit your work again from the very beginning,  if the management requires that you prepare a revision. Just browse to your existing submission and use the upload module to upload the newer version. If you are stuck, please send the revised article with an e-mail to the managing editor at jotcsa@turchemsoc.org.

Our journal will use, beginning from 10(1), a manual heading-based system with numbers, like 1. INTRODUCTION, etc.

You may download the article templates, depending on your word processor, from the link below. Kindly recall that we do not have any LaTeX templates for now:

*Article template (for Microsoft Word)

*Article template (for LibreOffice Writer)

Schemes usually used for reactions and related material will use Verdana, preferably at 9 or 10 points, inside the figures. Directly pasting from the drawing application into the word processor software is NOT recommended. Please use the "paste special" feature to paste it as an image (metafile pictures are strongly recommended).

Citing: Our journal uses a number-based reference system, and the number is given in normal parenthesis like (18). Other examples include (1-3, 18), (1-3, 18, 19-21), etc. The above-mentioned reference managers have the required tools to create citations in the text. When inserting a new paragraph, the manager will safely rearrange the citations, refreshing the numbers.

For proton or carbon nuclear magnetic resonance data, please see the article template above.

The words Scheme 1, Figure 1, etc., will have a full stop at the end of the caption. The caption text will be centered on the page.

Supplementary information: The authors are encouraged to use supplementary information, at the end of the article, for detailing the study with spectral data, crystal structure refinement data, and other types of material should you recommend including. All types of synthetic procedures will be included in the main text. Supplementary files continue the numbering and end with an even number of pages.

Usage of the units: The units will be, where possible, SI-based and the style g/mL will be preferred over g.mL^-1. Please do not mix these two and be consistent throughout the manuscript about using the units.

Publication ethics: It is imperative that the authors comply with national and international ethical rules in research and writing the article. More information can be found at this link.

For studies including biological materials taken from animals and humans, the authors must provide the statement, in their manuscript (preferably in the Acknowledgments section), that they performed the study according to the Helsinki declaration (see here) and they must present the informed consent forms from the ethical council of their institution and also from the people donating biologic materials or relatives of them.

You are free to receive new issue alerts and read the contents. This open-access chemical journal can be added to your list of journals, and you can help us with the policies we are using in order to create a perfect example of open-access publishing. We will publish the journal quarterly, every February, May, and August, and November.

Our open-access policy is quite straightforward. No one should access a scholarly paper by paying money. All scholarly activities should be free to download, read, and cite. Open Access Journals are very nice examples of this philosophy, and their most valued and important asset is the presence of a strong peer-reviewing medium. Without this, an open-access journal would quickly turn into garbage. We, managers of this journal, will keep the importance of peer-review in mind, and use this asset as much as possible, in order to make the readers meet the authors.

Private information, including e-mails, names, or affiliations, will not be shared outside this open-access journal system.

Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following terms:

Creative Commons Attribution License: Authors transfer the copyright to the journal at the first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The journal only allows others to download the works that appeared in the journal and share them with others as long as they credit the journal, but they can not change them in any way or use them commercially.

*Copyright: Our journal has adopted the CC-BY-NC-ND policy and has started accepting articles under this definition. Also, please read our copyright terms from the copyright transfer form.

The copyeditor will investigate the article and make the necessary changes, and the process will continue.

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 JOTCSA 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 JOTCSA and any other journal, are considered a major conduct flaw, and all the authors will be definitely banned, and all their previous publications in JOTCSA 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.

For studies including biological materials taken from animals and humans, the authors must provide the statement, in their manuscript (preferably in the Acknowledgments section), that they performed the study according to the Helsinki declaration and they must present the informed consent forms from the ethical council of their institution and also from the people donating biologic materials or relatives of them.

Reviewers: JOTCSA 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 themselves 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, they are gently asked to answer the invitation e-mail, informing if they are 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 interest do exist, and they are doing their 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 Open Access Policy: Our journal is open access and uses Dergipark's open access statements. The article, as soon as been published, is rendered open access and everyone can reach it without any payment.

Here is the BOAI declaration of open access:
“By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Journal’s Publication Policy: Our journal does not require any kind of payment 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, and a secretary makes an initial evaluation of it and decides if the article is eligible for further action, or if a refusal is issued. The same applies to any article whose similarity score by iThenticate is higher than 31%. The author is welcome 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 section editor, and passes the article file to them. The section editor calls forth at least two reviewers, who are experts in the field, and waits for their evaluation. The section editor gathers the evaluations from the reviewers, makes a brief list concerning the reviewers’ recommendations, and sends it 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 sending the revised article and the processed report. In some cases, the section editor makes it enough 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 makes corrections to 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 passed to the proofreader and when required, a list of corrections 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 IDs are entered. As the last step, the title, abstract, publication date, and page range are checked and DOI name is requested. If everything is successful, 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 is approved. The article has been published and can be seen on the journal's website. If there is still something to be corrected, the process begins again and the corrected article PDF is substituted for the old one. Kindly note that, if the issue has been published, there is an extra five days to commit changes. After that time, no changes are allowed and an Erratum document must be issued and published in the next issue.

The time required for the evaluation of a manuscript changes from article to article; however, it takes an average of four months to get a result. Exceptions occur when a reviewer responds 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 for which is capturing the e-mail by junk mail filters and they could not be aware of the development, therefore a terrible lag 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.

Conflict of interests: At the end of the article, the authors must declare their conflict of interests (if any).

The author or authors declare no conflict of interest (for the absence of the conflict of interest).

If there is a conflict of interest, the author or authors must be specific and include any financial relationship that all authors of the article have with any sponsoring organization and the for-profit interests the organization represents, and with any for-profit product discussed or implied in the text of the article.

Retraction: There is a form provided by Dergipark that editors could fill out about retraction issues, and we will inform Dergipark by filling out this form and following the process.

Post-publication corrections: After the launch of the issue, the editors will be given 5 (five) days for any late corrections. After that time, further corrections are not allowed and Erratum/Errata documents must be filled in and displayed in the next issue.


Please be advised,

Prof. Dr. Hasan KÜÇÜKBAY
Editor-in-chief, JOTCSA

Our journal does not require any forms of payment. It is a totally free and open-access journal.