The journal follows the CODE OF CONDUCT AND BEST PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR JOURNAL EDITORS, COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, and COPE Retraction Guidelines

Open Access Statement

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution.

The published articles are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided each paper is properly cited.

Duties of Editor-in-Chief

Publication decisions:

The Editor-in-Chief of the journal is responsible for deciding which of the submitted articles should be published. The Editor-in-Chief may be guided by the policies of the journal's Editorial Board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The Editor-in-Chief may confer with other editors or reviewers in making this decision.

Confidentiality:

The Editor-in-Chief and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Objectivity:

Submitted manuscripts are evaluated for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.

Peer review process: The Editor-in-chief/section editors must assure that a double-blind peer review process is effectively performed for each manuscript submitted to the journal system. 

Duties of Reviewers

Contribution to editorial decisions:

Peer review assists the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions and, through the editorial communication with the author, may also assist the author in improving the manuscript.

Acknowledgement of sources:

Reviewers should describe relating published study which has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also point out to the editor’s attention any vital resemblance or coincide between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal information.

Standards of objectivity:

Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inacceptable. Referees should express their views clearly with appropriate supporting arguments.  

Disclosure & conflict of interest:

Reviewers should not take into account the manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest derived from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships/connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions linked to the manuscripts.

Duties of Authors

Authorship of the paper: 

Authorship should be narrowed to those who have made a vital contribution to the reported study including conception, execution, design and interpretation. All authors made significant contributions to the submitted manuscript should be listed as co-authors, and that all co-authors have read and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Integrity: 

The authors shall abide by the ethics of scientific publishing and any manuscript that does not comply with it shall be rejected, and the manuscripts will be subject to a plagiarism detection review by using iThenticate.

Copyright:

By submitting a manuscript, the authors agree that the copyright for their article is transferred to the journal, if the paper is accepted for publication. 
The corresponding author of the article needs to fill out and submit a copyright form upon acceptance of the paper and prior to publication. (Download Copyright Form)

Conflict of interest:

Authors are required to declare to the Editor-in-Chief any Conflict of Interest that may have affected their research or decision to submit to the journal. 

Multiple, or concurrent publication:

An author should not publish manuscripts describing the same research in more than one journal. Parallel submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

Fundamental errors in published works:

When Author discovers an important error or incorrectness in her/his own published work, it is the Author’s duty to immediately notify the Editor or Publisher and cooperate with them to either retract the paper or to publish an appropriate erratum.
Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript has been accepted and only if approved by the Editor. To request such a change, the Editor must receive from the corresponding author the reason for the change in author list and written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed.

Publisher’s Confirmation

In cases of alleged or proven scientific misconduct, fraudulent publication or plagiarism, the publisher, in close collaboration with the Editor-in-Chief, will take all appropriate measures to clarify the situation and to amend the article in question. This includes the prompt publication of an erratum or, in the most severe cases, the complete retraction of the affected work. The Publisher and the Journal do not discriminate on the basis of age, color, religion, creed, disability, marital status, veteran status, national origin, race, gender, genetic predisposition or carrier status, or sexual orientation in its publishing programs, services and activities.

The publisher ensures that advertising, reprint or other commercial income shall have no affect on editorial decisions for any journal.