Publication Ethics

The publisher is committed to maintaining high standards of research integrity, editorial independence, transparency, and ethical scholarly communication. Authors, reviewers, editors, and readers are expected to act in accordance with accepted principles of responsible publication practice.

Author Responsibilities

Submitted manuscripts must represent original work and must not contain plagiarism, fabrication, or falsification.
All listed authors should have made a meaningful scholarly contribution to the work.
All authors should approve the final manuscript and agree to its submission.
Conflicts of interest, funding sources, and relevant institutional relationships must be disclosed.
Ethics approval and informed consent must be reported for research involving human participants where applicable.

Reviewer Responsibilities

Reviewers are expected to provide objective, constructive, confidential, and timely evaluations. Reviewers should decline assignments if they lack relevant expertise, cannot meet the deadline, or have a conflict of interest that could affect impartiality.

Reviewer Anonymity

The publisher follows a single-blind peer-review model unless otherwise stated for a specific journal, article type, or editorial policy. Reviewer identities are not disclosed to authors. Authors may receive reviewer comments labelled as Reviewer #1, Reviewer #2, and so on.

Reviewer comments intended for authors are shared anonymously. Confidential comments submitted to the editor are used only for editorial decision-making and are not shared with authors. Editors and authorized editorial staff may access reviewer identities for workflow management, conflict-of-interest assessment, quality assurance, and editorial accountability.

Editorial Responsibilities

Editors are responsible for managing manuscripts fairly and confidentially. Editorial decisions should be based on scholarly merit, relevance, methodological quality, ethical compliance, and reviewer feedback where applicable. Editors should declare conflicts of interest and avoid handling manuscripts where impartiality may be compromised.

Research Misconduct

Concerns related to plagiarism, duplicate publication, data manipulation, image manipulation, authorship disputes, undisclosed conflicts of interest, or other forms of misconduct may be investigated according to the publisher’s editorial procedures. Corrective action may include manuscript rejection, correction, expression of concern, or retraction.

Corrections, Retractions, and Editorial Notices

When significant errors or ethical concerns are identified after publication, the publisher may issue corrections, retractions, or other editorial notices to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record.

Similarity Screening

Submitted manuscripts may be screened using similarity-checking software as part of the editorial assessment process. Similarity reports are used to support editorial judgement and do not automatically determine whether plagiarism has occurred. Editors may request clarification, revision, or take further action where substantial unattributed overlap, duplicate publication, text recycling, or other publication ethics concerns are identified.