Ethics and Code of Conduct
Ethics requirements for publishing with CLEIej
Nowadays, the scientific structure relies on a publication system based on fair and honest peer review process to determine the quality of the work to be published. The work presented for evaluation and publication by authors reflects the quality of the institutions that support them. This evaluation procedure is backed on an ethical behavior of all community members: authors, reviewers, and editors. It is therefore important to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior.
In what follows the main points related to authorship, originality and plagiarism, citation and data reporting are listed.
Authors
An author should meet all the following criteria: Made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution or interpretation of the experiments or data associated with the work contained in the article; Contributed to drafting the article or reviewing or revising the intellectual content; Approved the final version of the article including the references. Transparency about the authors contributions is recommended in the form of contributions provided by each of them.
Originality and plagiarism
The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works. If the work includes or uses work made by others, they should be appropriately cited or quoted. Plagiarism is ethically unacceptable. Any inclusion of work made by other persons, even if it is not an identical reproduction, should be recognized in an explicit way (besides respecting the corresponding copyright and intellectual property regulation). Auto-plagiarism is ethically unacceptable. The following cases will be considered as such:
1- A new edition of a whole paper or a significant part of it in a new publication in a new context (for example, when a paper presented at a conference is submitted to a journal where it does not recognize explicitly the previous publication and its authors).
2- The re-utilization of phrases or paragraphs of previous publications that are minor parts in a recent publication.
3- Multiple presentations of papers substantially similar are unacceptable. The following cases will not be considered as such:
a- Presentations that have been submitted to other events and have been rejected.
b- The submission of the same material or substantially the same material for publication in different languages, subject to the explicit reference of each article to the organizers of the different events at the moment of the submission.
c- The authors should recognize the contribution of previous works and describe them in a precise and fair way with the adequate respect, even in the case that the mention is made to mark limitations and possible improvements.
d- The journal article cites the conference article and clearly indicates how the two articles differ.
Inappropriate use of citations
Citing should be used with the purpose of referencing relevant previous work or sources. The use of references to artificially inflate citation metrics is considered a breach to ethics. Reviewers and editors should monitor that citing is adequate and never should coerce authors to include specific references.
Data accuracy
The work should report data used in a clear and accurate way. Under no circumstances authors should falsificate data (manipulate research materials, equipment or processes or changing or omitting data or results), fabricate (inventing data or results), manipulate images (by changing axes, scale in such a way that results are not shown properly).
Disclosure and conflicts of interest:
Authors should mention any possible conflicts of interest with a list of potential reviewers or editors. The conflict of interest is provided whenever the people involved have or have been in a family relation, employment relation or supervisor-student relation. There is a conflict of interest also when there is financial support involved in any direction between authors, reviewers or editors. Only legitimate cases should be listed.
Errors in published Works
In the case an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her published work, it is the author’s obligation to notify the journal editor as soon as possible to retract or correct the paper.
Reporting standards
When the work presents results it should include an objective discussion of its significance and be described in an accurate account as to allow readers to reproduce the results.
Hazards and human or animal subjects, privacy statements and ethics committee
In the case the work published by authors involve the use of chemicals or procedures that may include unusual hazards in their use, or in the case when animals or human subjects are involved, compliance statements should be included. In the case that studies include patients or volunteer records an informed consent is necessary and also the approvement of the ethics committee of the institutions involved in the research.
Penalties
- Is the responsibility of the Editor-in-Chief when a breach to the present code is suspected, to handle it with the proper readiness, discretion and efficiency in collaboration with all the involved parts (including reviewers and other publications affected), to guarantee the equity between them and if is necessary to apply the corresponding penalty,
- Before applying any sanction, the Editor-in-Chief will give potential violators the opportunity to explain their behavior and correct any accusation without support.
- The Editor-in-Chief will assure that the penalty is proportional to the seriousness of the fault. Faults will be differentiated between those that make on purpose from those that make without intention; and between the offenders those that are young and inexperienced from those professionals with a trajectory. In the case of being the first violation to this code and if the offenders manifest their written commitment to not repeat the breach, the Editor should consider the circumstances. In those cases, the penalties should avoid severely damaging the reputation and their prospective career.
The procedure for dealing with suspected plagiarism cases is the detailed bellow:
- When a reviewer or editor detects a suspected case of plagiarism, he/she notifies it to the Editor-in-Chief.
- The Editor-in-Chief and two members of the Board of CLEI are designated as members of a committee which will revise the evidence presented, and will contact the authors in order to receive their individual discharges.
- If the committee decides there has been attempted plagiarism, it will impose upon the offending parties sanctions that can include banning authors from publishing in CLEIej for a number of years, and other suitable measures. If the paper has already been published by CLEIej, a retraction will be published.
- CLEIej will include in its homepage the names of authors found guilty of plagiarism, and the applied sanction.
- The breach to the code may be reported to the supervisors, and the corresponding institutions including those in which the infractors work.
- The breach to the code may be reported to the scientific community in general.
