Online Science Education Journal (OSEJ) is published once every 6 months, thus twice a year (June and December) in Kastamonu, TURKIYE. OSEJ is a peer-reviewed journal, which includes translated works, book reviews, and original research and review articles reporting qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-method studies in the field of science education. Articles can be submitted in Turkish or English language. As of 2020, only English articles are considered.

At OSEJ, it attached high importance to the integrity of our academic content, publication ethics, and process as well as maintaining authors’ research integrity. To this end, A number of ethical policies have been developed by the editorial team and the editorial board to ensure the impartiality and ethics of the work to be published in the OSEJ. It is also best to follow the guidelines and resources provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to reach and maintain international publication standards by the editorial office. Here, it is outlined basic principles that we apply to our journal, which we believe will be useful for researchers and authors who wish to publish their articles in our journal.

OSEJ works with experts in the context of science education. Manuscripts that are submitted for evaluation go under initial screening for compliance with our publication ethics and malpractice statement under the supervision of the Chief Editor. Reviewers are appointed for the manuscripts that are approved by the Editorial Board after the preliminary examination regarding content. The manuscripts that are not approved by the Editorial Board shall be rejected. Each article is sent to two reviewers. If one of the reviewer’s reports is negative, the manuscript is sent to the third reviewer. In accordance with the reviewers’ reports, it is decided that the manuscript should be published, revised, or rejected. The authors are notified of this decision.

In case of corrections given to the manuscript, the corrections must be made within the period specified by the Editorial Board and sent to the Board. The manuscripts that are not revised in time shall be rejected. All submitted manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with OSEJ manuscript guidelines. The manuscripts that are considered inadequate in terms of language, regardless of content, are sent back or rejected. Prior to their submission, authors are advised to have their manuscripts proofread.

Either referee(s) nor author(s) do not know the personal information of each other. All this privacy policy is under the responsibility of the editing office. OSEJ editorial team never discriminates against authors or peer reviewers based on personal characteristics or identity. If OSEJ editorial team identifies malpractice in the manuscripts submitted or articles published, the editorial board will deal with the issue immediately and can take action including withdrawal, retraction, or correction.

The editorial team of OSEJ should hold the following ethical responsibilities that are based on the guides "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 editors have the following roles and responsibilities:

Ensuring the development of the journal in the national and international sense.

Managing processes to improve the quality of published studies

Conducting processes to apply ethical rules for all shareholders of the journal.

Updating publishing and ethical policies with the purpose of bringing a contribution to the development of the journal.

Organizing and updating the website of the journal.

For the authors, OSEJ, recommends applying the following principles before they submit their manuscripts, and assumes that the authors accept the principles.

Authors are not to submit their studies to application processes of multiple journals, and also they should not submit any published study to the OSEJ. Moreover, any under-review study submitted to another journal is not to be submitted to OSEJ.

The authors are responsible for the contents and appendices (pictures, drawings, maps, documents, etc.) included in the articles submitted to OSEJ. It is assumed that the authors submitting their manuscripts have accepted this responsibility. They confirm that their articles' content does not bind the owner, editor, co-editors, or advisory board members of OSEJ.

No contract is required for the transfer of copyright from authors. It is regarded that the authors of the manuscripts that are submitted and accepted after the reviewing process transfer all copyrights to OSEJ. The authors are included in the publication process by agreeing to hand over all copyrights to OSEJ. Manuscripts may not be published elsewhere without written permission from the OSEJ editor.

For translated works, the translator should receive permission from the author(s) of the relevant article. Copyright costs for translated articles are to be covered by the translator/author.

OSEJ does not charge any article submission, editorial processing, article publication (page or color), or subscription charges.

All authors who contributed to the conduct of the research including any part of the research process should be listed as an author. Any process such as adding-removing an author, or changing the order of authors cannot be demanded by a study under review process. Names that do not contribute to the study are not to be specified as authors. Conflicts of interest or relationships must be explained (if available). Authors’ names and surnames, affiliations, e-mail addresses, and ORCIDs must be clearly stated in the manuscript if their manuscript is accepted and approved.

The corresponding author is responsible for the whole process and content of the manuscript and acting on behalf of all co-authors in responding to queries from all sources post-publication.

Authors must declare that their articles are original and have not been published previously or are not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Raw materials of the submitted article(s) can be requested within the framework of evaluation processes. Authors must submit the requested data and information to editorial and science boards.

Authors have the right to request a withdrawal, retraction, or correction(s) of their articles at any time before they are published. However, they can only request retractions or corrections of their articles within five days after their article is published in an issue.

Also, the author(s) have rights. Author(s) can;

detect the reviewers to whom the studies should not be sent due to conflict of interest and/or other ethical reasons,.

withdraw their unpublished study during the review process,

oppose reviewer reports and editor decisions,

demand erratum for information errors or problem areas in the given study to be published in the first issue due to errors in fact during the publication process.

For reviewers, OSEJ expects to review articles according to the following principles.

Reviewers are expected to read the publishing principles of the OSEJ.

Studies submitted to the OSEJ are reviewed by at least two reviewers in the related field. Ideas of the editor or a third reviewer are asked in case of equity between negative and positive views on the article during reviewing process.

A double-blind review process has been adopted in the OSEJ, authors, and reviewers are not aware of each other’s identity. Reviewers should refuse to review when they realize they cannot be objective. Reviewers should also refuse to review in case of a conflict of interest and inform the editor about it.

Reviewers should accept to review only the studies in their specialty fields, and not accept reviewing the manuscript in the field in which they are not experts even for have information about the topic of the given article. Reviewers should make sure that the review is related to the content of any given manuscript.

Reviewers should complete the review process in a certain period of time, and review on unbiased and confidential terms.

Reviewers should be reviewing the manuscript in constructive and polite language, and not comment on personal views such as hospitality, insult, and reflation.

Reviewers should pay attention not to bring the effect of religion, race, sex, political views, and so on into the review process.

OSEJ brings the following cases to the attention of the authors.

The manuscripts submitted to OSEJ must not have been previously published or submitted to be published in any printed/digital publications. The publication process shall be immediately canceled if it is found that the manuscripts submitted to OSEJ and taken in the reviewing process have been submitted to another publisher and/or have been previously published in the same or similar format.

OSEJ editorial team takes serious measures to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, and thus they do not encourage such misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place.

If the OSEJ editorial team identifies or has grounds for suspecting research misconduct, they will deal with allegations appropriately. The OSEJ editorial team is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.

Authors can only request retractions or corrections of their articles within five days after their article is published in an issue.

OSEJ never tolerates plagiarism and self-plagiarism and has the right to check all submissions using tools such as Turnitin and Ithenticate. OSEJ accepts manuscripts up to a maximum similarity rate of 20%. Except for exceptional cases, this limit cannot be exceeded, and any submitted article that has a higher rate of similarity than mentioned here will be rejected.

All authors must comply with both national and international academic, and scientific ethical rules.

The authors have unilateral responsibility for the issues such as citations and plagiarism within the framework of the relevant laws.

In the manuscripts prepared from the master’s or doctoral theses, the authors must state that the manuscript is prepared from such a study. Otherwise, it is considered within the frame of plagiarism. In the name order, the name of the owner of the thesis is written first; the supervisor and other authors cannot be written before the owner of the thesis. The contribution of authors other than the owner of the thesis and the supervisor is stated in the manuscript.

OSEJ is a fully open-access journal and it provides free and unlimited access to the articles that it publishes without any form of restriction, subscription, or requirement. Thus, OSEJ lets researchers remix, adapt, and build upon the articles published on its website non-commercially, as long as they credit OSEJ and license their new work under identical terms.

All the articles published on the OSEJ website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA). Because of its open-access policy, OSEJ does not accept others to commercially share the articles that it publishes.

Papers submitted to OSEJ will be screened for plagiarism using iThenticate or Turnitin plagiarism detection tools. OSEJ will immediately reject papers leading to plagiarism or self-plagiarism.

OSEJ is a completely free journal. There is no author’s submission fee or another publication-related fee since every cost for the publication process is supported by the publisher; therefore, it is an open-access journal.

Publication Process

Blind Refereeing
In the review process of the articles, OSEJ makes use of double blind refereeing method, and the identity of authors and referees are concealed.

Initial Review Process
The articles submitted to the OSEJ are first subject to preliminary review of writing rules and journal template suitability by the Secretariat, and then forwarded to the Editor-in-chief with the purpose of referee assignment. If the submitted articles are unsuitable in terms of writing rules, originality, and accordance with the publication principles, it is returned to their author without a referee review. In the preliminary review, the editors inspect the introduction, literature review, method, findings, results, assessment, and discussion sections of the articles with respect to suitability with the publication principles and content of the journal. The articles which are found to be eligible are taken under referee review.

Referee Review Process
The articles are sent to the referees according to the content and referee speciality. The article which is found to be eligible by the editors is forwarded to at least two referees for review along with a review form. The referees are given 30 days for the review. It is obligatory to fill out the "Revision Template” which is prepared by the referees or the editors containing revisions within 30 days. The referees may decide on the suitability by inspecting the readjustments as well as requesting multiple revisions.
Many factors take role in the selection of referee. Experience, suitability of field, past experiences between the editor and referee are the determining factors. Author(s) may request to exclude certain referees for the reason of conflict of interests.

Review Results
The feedback received from the referees is examined by the editors within two weeks at the latest. A new referee may be assigned following the review process; in addition, there may be an approval, revision or rejection decision.

How Long Is The Publication Process?
It is anticipated that the evaluation process of the articles submitted to OSEJ concludes in approximately 2 months, if everything right. However, this period of time may extend depending on revision requests, duration of the revisions, and re-evaluation of the articles.

Revision Directions and Uploading Guide
At OSEJ, in review process, one or more revisions may be requested by the editors and/or referees for the articles. The authors are obligated to apply the requested revisions. The authors should make the revisions by using “Track changes” feature or by using the red colour on the original document. The authors should upload revised document with track changes and the prepared by using the revision template.

Post-Acceptance
At OSEJ, the articles approved after review are gone through; plagiarism re-inspection, reference list organizing, citation control, layout and typesetting, respectively.

OSEJ uses DergiPark hosting services and an editorial workflow management system provided by TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM. DergiPark system saves each document and manuscript uploaded to the system electronically. In the event that OSEJ starts to use a different hosting service and an editorial workflow management system, all the backups will be transferred to that system, and access to the new website will be preserved.

OSEJ is published by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Altan KURNAZ, who owns the journal and is a science education researcher at Kastamonu University in Kastamonu/Turkey. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Altan KURNAZ, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hafife Bozdemir Yüzbaşıoğlu, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ebru Ezberci Çevik, Assist. Prof. Dr. B. Deniz Altunoğlu act as the publishing supervisor for all the management and editorial processes.

For more detailed information about the Management Board and Editorial Board, please visit the related pages of the journal.

OSEJ is hosted, managed, and published electronically on https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/ofed. On this website, all stakeholders can reach the archive of previous issues, and find out other useful information regarding the journal.

OSEJ editorial team does its best to ensure high ethical and professional standards. They also do their best to keep the website up-to-date.

OSEJ is an electronic academic journal published in June and December, twice a year.

Online Science Education Journal (Online Fen Eğitimi Dergisi, in Turkish), OSEJ, is published with e-ISSN: 2548-0065.