“This journal is following of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and complies with the highest ethical standards in accordance with ethical laws”.
Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement
1) Introduction
Academic researches, through production and critique of knowledge and technology, and by providing social change strategies, play vital roles in the fate of their societies. Therefore, it is expected that researchers will supply valid scientific findings, to be effective in improvement of the fate of society and the scientific community can provide the groundwork for the development of knowledge. Meanwhile, observing the ethical principles and behaviors in conducting and publishing research findings is a major contributor to the trust and reliance on research products and outcomes. To ignore standards of research ethics, consciously or unconsciously, reduces the scientific validity of research findings and makes the process of knowledge production difficult. Although ethical conducts in research, at first glance, are concerned with the individual and its own conscience and beliefs. However, the codification and compilation of ethical standards of research, their education and promotion among researchers and the academic community, could set the stage for the observance and development of ethical standards in the field of research. Hence, the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of I.R. of Iran (MSRT) with the aim of preserving the dignity, health, and safety, and privacy of the subjects, honoring the principles of scientific ethics and academic freedoms of researchers, to prevent undermining the reputation of the country in national and international arenas, to ensure the research and researchers, promoting desirable research behaviors, and to do research for more credibility, has attempted to develop the principles and standards of the research ethics as follows.
This bylaw is a charter that specifies some ethical limits and responsibilities related to scientific research and its publication in the RIHU Scientific Journals. The purpose is to preclude the authors' conscious or unconscious violation of research and publication principles.
This bye-law has been derived from "The Charter and Regulations of Research Ethics" enacted by the research and technology deputy of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran, the agreed-upon international publication regulations, and the experiences gained through RIHU Scientific Journals as well as other national journals. The references used for this bylaw are listed in the end.
Authors, reviewers, the editorial board, and the editor-in-chief are obliged to know and abide by all the principles of publication ethics and responsibilities. The submission of articles by authors, reviewing of articles by reviewers, and the decision of accepting or declining them by the editorial board as well as the editor-in-chief are tantamount to knowing and following the rules.
In case of a breach of principles, the journal has the right to take legal actions against violators. "The Charter and Regulations of Research Ethics" enacted by the research and technology deputy of Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran (MSRT), should be taken as the guideline for authors, and all parties involved in review and publication of the articles.
2) Duties and Responsibilities of Publisher
(http://publicationethics.org/files/Code%20of%20conduct%20for%20publishers%20FINAL_1_0.pdf)
1) MSSH is committing to ensure that editorial decisions on manuscript submissions are final.
2) MSSH is promising to ensure that the decision on manuscript submissions is only made based on professional judgment and will not be affected by any commercial interests.
3) MSSH is committing to maintaining the integrity of academic and research records.
4) MSSH is monitoring the ethics by Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers.
5) MSSH is always checking the plagiarism and fraudulent data issues involving in the submitted manuscript.
6) MSSH is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.
3) Duties and Responsibilities of Editors, Editor-in-Chief, and Editorial Board
(http://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf)
7) The Editors of the journal should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
8) The Editors of the journal should maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review or until they are published.
9) The Editor-in-Chief should make a decision on submitted manuscripts, whether to be published or not with other editors and reviewers
10) The Editors of the journal should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
11) The Editors of the journal should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
12) The Editors of the journal should maintain academic integrity and strive to meet the needs of readers and authors.
13) The Editors of the journal should be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent data issues and willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
14) The Editors of the journal should have the limit themselves only to the intellectual content.
15) The Editors of the journal must not disclose any information about submitted manuscripts to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
16) Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.
17) The editor-in-chief and the editorial board have the authority of accepting or declining an article after having the reviewers' decisions, and in this way:
18) The editor-in-chief and the editorial board try to choose proper reviewers based on their specific field, their competence, scientific and professional experience, as well as ethical commitment. They are expected to respect the authors' reasonable and rational requests for not wishing special reviewers to review their article.
19) The editor-in-chief welcomes profound and logical reviews, avoids shallow and weak judgments, and confronts biased nonsense, or contemptuous judgments.
20) The decision on accepting or declining articles should be based on evaluating the reviewers' professional opinions and assessing their opinion accuracy. Moreover, scientific documentation and enough reasons should be provided, and personal, stylistic, vocational, racial, religious, and decisions should be avoided.
21) The editor-in-chief and the editorial board should keep all information in the article confidential and avoid revealing to or discussing its details with others.
22) Before the article gets published, the editor-in-chief and the editorial board have no right to use its data or its new concepts for or against his own or other studies or to criticize or discredit the author. After the article gets published, the reviewer will not be allowed to reveal more details than what the journal presents. The exceptions involve cases related to the authors' Research and Publication Misconduct if there is an acceptable reason to do so.
23) The editor-in-chief and the editorial board have to avoid any conflict of interest in the reviewing process with respect to any person, business, academics, or financial relations that may potentially affect the acceptance and the publication of the submitted article.
24) The editor-in-chief should carefully and seriously examine those articles suspected of breaching the publication and research ethics reported by reviewers and if needed, act to sue for “publication and research misconduct".
25) The editor-in-chief should provide enough time for the authors accused of publication and research misconduct to respond.
26) The journal editor-in-chief has to immediately remove the published articles proved to include publication and research misconduct and clearly inform the readers and the indexing databases.
27) The editor-in-chief and the editorial board are expected to welcome reasonable and acceptable criticisms of the published articles.
4) Duties and Responsibilities of Reviewers
(http://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Peer%20review%20guidelines.pdf)
Reviewers assist the editor-in-chief and the editorial board in reviewing the quality, content, and scientific characteristics of the articles. Through the journal office, they assist in enriching the quality and the content of the articles.
28) The reviewers should maintain the confidentiality of manuscripts, which they are invited to review.
29) The reviewers should provide comments in time that will help editors to make decisions on the submitted manuscript to be published or not.
30) The reviewers are bound to treat the manuscript received for peer reviewing as confidential, and must not use the information obtained through peer review for personal advantage.
31) The reviewers' comments against each invited manuscript should be technical, professional, and objective.
32) The reviewers should not review the manuscripts in which they have found conflicts of interest with any of the authors, companies, or institutions.
33) The reviewers should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
34) The reviewer should not accept the articles with which he/she has principal disagreement which may affect the fairness of his/her decision.
35) The reviewer should not accept reviewing articles to which include interests of people, institutes and specific organizations, or personal relations.
36) The reviewer should not accept reviewing the articles which he/she contributed to their conduct, analyses, or writing.
37) Review of the article should be based on scientific documents and enough argument. It should be without the interference of personal, vocational, racial, religious, or other preferences.
38) The reviewer is expected to offer to the editor-in-chief and the author (authors) his/her evaluation on the strong and weak points of the article in an effective, clear, academic manner, and assess the strong and weak points as well as suggest solutions for revising the article.
39) If the article does not suffer from principal shortcomings, the reviewers should not rewrite or revise it based on their own personal interests and preferences. Reviewers should keep in mind that the journal needs their scientific expertise, not their editing skills.
40) The reviewer is expected to inform the author of the related published studies not mentioned in the article.
41) The reviewer should keep all the information in the article confidential and avoid revealing to or discussing its details with others.
42) Before the article gets published, the reviewer has no right to use its data or its new concepts for or against his own or other studies or to criticize or discredit the author. After the article is published, the reviewer will not be allowed to reveal more details than what the journal presents.
43) The reviewer is not allowed to devolve his own responsibility to another person such as his colleagues or graduate students except with the editor-in-chief's permission. Anybody assisting in reviewing the article should be mentioned in the review report and the journal documents.
44) The reviewer is not permitted to contact the author on the articles being reviewed. Any contact with the authors is made through the journal office.
45) Reviewers are expected to be serious and effortful in reporting the Research and Publication Misconduct and sending the related documents to the editor-in-chief.
5) Duties and Responsibilities of Authors
(http://publicationethics.org/files/International%20standards_authors_for%20website_11_Nov_2011.pdf)
46) Authors should have specialized knowledge updated on the subject; the researcher should have specialized updated knowledge and expertise and in the selection, development, and compilation of the scientific problem or subject matter, refers to related prior knowledge, observes its relevance and conformity with his/her specialized field of knowledge. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship.
47) The submitted articles should be related to the specialized fields of the journal and be prepared scientifically and coherently according to the journal standards.
48) The articles should be the original research of the authors, with any use of other studies properly documented. The research should be carried out precisely and the data should be reported accurately.
49) Authors are responsible for the accuracy and precision of the content. Publishing the articles does not mean the journal is confirming the content of the articles.
50) Authors should avoid "Research and Publication Misconduct" as mentioned in section 3.
51) Authors cannot duplicate the submission of one article. In other words, their article or a part of it should not have been published in another national or international journal or should not be in the process of reviewing or publication.
52) Authors are not permitted to have overlapping publications, which means publishing data and findings of their previous article/s with slight changes as another article with a different title.
53) If using other studies is necessary, authors have to precisely cite them and, if necessary, receive explicit written permission from the author of the original study. When the exact words of another researcher are used, methods, and symbols of quoting such as quotation marks should be used.
54) The corresponding author should ensure that the article contains names and other information of all authors, but not others who did not contribute to the research and writing of the article. In other words, adding the gift authorship and omitting the ghost authorship should be avoided.
55) The corresponding author should ensure that all authors read the article and agree upon its submission and also on the order of their names as authors.
56) Submitting an article means that authors have satisfied and introduced all financial or local supporters.
57) Whenever any error or inaccuracy is found in their article, authors should inform the journal, try to correct it, or withdraw the article.
58) Any risk likely to be posed by the research to people or the environment should be mentioned clearly in the article.
59) Manuscripts must be submitted with the understanding that they have not been published elsewhere (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis) and are not currently under consideration by another journal published by or any other publisher.
60) The submitting (corresponding) author is responsible for ensuring that the manuscript article's publication has been approved by all the other coauthors.
61) In order to sustain the peer review system, authors have an obligation to participate in the peer-review process to evaluate manuscripts from others.
62) It is also the authors' responsibility to ensure that the manuscripts emanating from a particular institution are submitted with the approval of the necessary institution.
63) It is a condition for submission of a manuscript that the authors permit editing of the paper for readability.
64) Authors are requested to clearly identify who provided financial support for the conduct of research and/or preparation of the manuscript and briefly describe the role of the funder/sponsor in any part of the work.
65) A copyright release and conflict of interest disclosure form must be signed by the corresponding author in case of multiple authorships, prior to the acceptation of the manuscript, by all authors, for publication to be legally responsible towards the Journal ethics and privacy policy.
66) Under open access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly.
67) All authors have agreed to allow the corresponding author to serve as the primary correspondent with the editorial office, to review the edited manuscript and proof.
68) When the author(s) discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher to retract or correct the manuscript.
69) All authors must know that the submitted manuscripts under review or published with MSSH are subject to screening using Plagiarism Prevention Software. Plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics.
70) All authors must ensure that all authors have read the submission final checklist before being submitted to the MSSH.
71) The researcher’s choice of method is in proportion to the goals and expenses of the research. The researchers should also use suitable methods to depict the research’s theme. They should learn how to use the method in various stages of conducting research. The researcher has the overall responsibility with regard to questions of method, data collection, and interpretation of the results.
6. Research and Publication Misconduct
If the occurrence of the following cases was confirmed at any stages of submission, review, revision, or publication of the article in the journal, it will be considered Research and Publication Misconduct and the journal has the right to act according to the law.
• Fabrication of data: It means reporting unreal issues, fabricated data, and findings as personal experimental results, empirical studies, or findings. The unreal record of what has not happened or misplaced the results of different studies are some examples of this violation.
• Falsification of data: It means recording and presenting the findings of the study so that the details of its procedure or the process of data collection are manipulated, data is omitted or changed, or some less important findings are exaggerated to conceal the more important ones (juicy quotes) in such a way that the results of the study serve specific purposes or the presented findings are not doubted.
• Plagiarism: It means the close adopting of other authors' ideas or words, copying other people's ideas, the similarity in the style of writing, and attributing others' ideas and findings without proper citation or introducing them as one’s own original scientific research.
• Scientific Hiring: It is related to the time when the author (authors) employs another person for doing the research and in the end, with few changes, publishes that study in his/her own name.
• Unreal affiliation: It means the false affiliation of the author (authors) to an organization, center, or educational /research department which did not contribute to the research.
• Duplicate submission: overlapping publication, adding the "gift author" or omitting the
"ghost author"
7: Plagiarism
Research Institute of Hawzah and University (RIHU), as the leading research institute of humanities and social sciences in Iran, holds in high regard authentic and original scholarly works and research efforts. In line with this principle, the Research Institute of Hawzah and University Press has zero-tolerance for plagiarism and meticulously studies each and every article submitted to its journals to ensure all RIHU-published material remains plagiarism-free. It is worth mentioning that since plagiarism is the most common misstep in producing scholarly work, the RIHU Press takes all possible measures to avoid and tackle this issue.
The RIHU Press follows the definitions and guidelines as determined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). You can find the complete list of COPE guideline material on publication ethics, codes, and regulations at www.publicationethics.org/resources.
With regard to plagiarism, all RIHU journals abide by the following definition provided by the APA Publication Manual (6th Ed.) (2010) which defines plagiarism as:
As an umbrella term, plagiarism covers different acts:
It should be noted that, regardless of the source, the RIHU Press regards any uncited or uncredited use of others’ works and productions as plagiarism. Such sources include published/unpublished authors; published/unpublished theses and dissertations; speeches; authors’ own works (incorrect use of which leads to self-plagiarism); PowerPoint presentations; instructional visual aids; journal articles; magazines and newspapers, etc.
The RIHU Press carefully studies all submitted articles, and plagiarism issues will be tackled in all article publication stages:
The RIHU Press uses state-of-the-art web-based and offline plagiarism detection software to detect plagiarized work and stop the publication of such materials. This software is linked to various worldwide databases and crosscheck newly-submitted work with vast amounts of material of the same category in order to verify the work’s originality and authenticity.
8. Office of Scientific Journals
RIHU Office of Scientific Journals is responsible for editing and formatting the accepted articles and finally getting the electronic and printed versions published. Along with its general responsibilities, this office considers the following cases:
9: Method and Materials
The materials and methods section should include the design of the study, the type of materials involved, and a clear description of all comparisons, in addition to being concise but sufficient for repetition by other qualified investigators. Procedures that have been published previously should not be described in detail, but merely cited with appropriate references. However, new or significant modifications of previously published procedures need full descriptions. The sources of special chemicals, equipment, or preparations should be given along with their company name and country. For all chemicals and reagents used, a generic name should be provided rather than a brand name. For animal experimentation reported in this journal, it is expected that the guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals be observed. The acknowledgment of the ethical guidelines of the animal welfare committee is strongly encouraged. For experimental studies involving animals and plants, authors must also document informed consent from the client or owner and adherence to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care.
10. Confronting the Publication and Research Misconduct
Upon observing “Publication and Research Misconduct” cases, the journal reserves its right to stop the review process before publication or removal of the article from the publication list. After careful examination by the editorial board, these cases will be revealed to the authors and at the same time will be subjected to further legal proceedings.
11. Complaints and Appeals
The “Journal of Studies in Islam and Psychology” responds promptly to complaints and ensures there is a way for dissatisfied complainants to take complaints further by sending an email to the editor-in-chief of the journal. We follow the COPE's guidelines and flowcharts for handling complaints against the journal, its staff, editorial board, or publisher.
References
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Ferguson, K., Masur, S., Olson, L., Ramirez, J., Robyn, First Minister, and Deputy First Minister.
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Macfarlane, B., & Saitoh, Y. (2008). Research Ethics in Japanese Higher Education: Faculty Attitudes and Cultural Mediation. Journal of Academic Ethics, 6(3), 181-195.
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Ethical principles of article publication, Urban Landscape Research, Specialized Journal of Landscape Architectures, and Urban Design.
Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE Code of Conduct, www.publicationethics.org.
Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, www.publicationethics.org.
S. Rockwell, Ethics of Peer Review: A Guide for Manuscript Reviewers, http://www.wame.org/ethical_issues_in_peer_review.pdf/view.
Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE Code of Conduct, and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, www.publicationethics.org.
Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers, www.publicationethics.org.