Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

Our publication ethics and publication malpractice statement is mainly based on the Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors (Committee on Publication Ethics, 2011).

Editors' responsibilities

Publication decisions

The editor is responsible for deciding which of the papers submitted to the journal will be published. The editor will evaluate manuscripts on academic merit alone without regard to the authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy. The decision will be based on the paper’s importance, clarity, and the study’s validity and its relevance to the journal's scope. Current legal requirements regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism should also be considered.

Confidentiality

Prior to the IPOL preprint publication, the editor 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. Editors should protect reviewers’ identities. However, if reviewers wish to disclose their names, this should be permitted.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the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.

Editorial conflicts of interest

Editors should not be involved in decisions about papers in which they have a conflict of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions associated with the papers. In this regards, in the case an editor has a conflict of interest concerning a paper assigned to her/him, she/he has to declare the conflict of interest in order the paper be assigned to another editor.

Reviewers' responsibilities

Contribution to editorial decisions

The peer-reviewing process assists the editor and the editorial board in making editorial decisions and may also serve the author in improving the paper.

Promptness

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and withdraw from the review process.

Confidentiality

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be disclosed to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.

Standards of objectivity

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

Acknowledgement of sources

Reviewers should identify cases in which relevant published work referred to in the paper has not been cited in the reference section. They should point out whether observations or arguments derived from other publications are accompanied by the respective source. Reviewers will notify the editor of any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.

Disclosure and conflict of interest

Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions associated with the papers.

Authors' duties

IPOL expects the authors to be honest: they should not fabricate or manipulate data to support their claims, select favorable illustrations or hide known issues with their works. Failing to comply with these rules can result in the retraction of a published article.

Reporting standards

Authors of research papers should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. The provided source code and Online DEMO associated to the paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work experiments. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.

Data access and retention

Authors could be asked to provide the raw data of their study together with the paper for editorial review and publication in the IPOL web site. In any event, authors should ensure accessibility of such data to other competent professionals for at least ten years after publication provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and legal rights concerning proprietary data do not preclude their release.

Originality, plagiarism and acknowledgement of sources

Authors will only submit entirely original works. In this regards, and according to the IPOL Journal scope, new algorithm design and/or implementation of relevant existing techniques will be considered as original works. Authors will appropriately cite or quote the work and/or words of others. Publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work should also be cited.

Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication

In general, papers describing essentially the same research should not be published in more than one journal. Submitting the same paper to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

Manuscripts which have been published as copyrighted material elsewhere cannot be submitted. In addition, manuscripts under review by the journal should not be resubmitted to copyrighted publications. However, by submitting a manuscript, the author(s) retain the rights to the published material. In case of publication they permit the use of their work under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license: users are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the articles for non-commercial purposes if they attribute the work to the authors and maintain this license. The implementations are distributed under a free software license; please refer to each implementation for more detail about the licensing option.

open access, copyright and license policy

Authorship of the paper

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors.

The corresponding author ensures that all contributing co-authors and no uninvolved persons are included in the author list. The corresponding author will also verify that all co-authors have approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

All authors should include a statement disclosing any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that may be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

Fundamental errors in published works When an author 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 and to cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper in form of an erratum.

References

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). (2011, March 7)
PsychOpen Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement