Publication Ethics

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

General Considerations 

The ethical policy of the Journal of Chemistry Letters is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. It complies with the International Committee of Journal Editorial Board codes of conduct.

  • Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors should follow these ethical policies when working with the journal.
  • Any kind of plagiarism constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable.

For information on this matter in publishing and ethical guidelines, please visit http://publicationethics.org.

 

COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts  


Publication and authorship

  •  All submitted papers are subject to a double-blind peer-review process by at least two international reviewers who are experts in the area of the particular paper.
  • The factors that are taken into account in the review are relevance, soundness, significance, originality, readability, and language.
  • The possible decisions include acceptance, acceptance with revisions, or rejection.
  • If authors are encouraged to revise and resubmit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted.
  • The acceptance of the paper is constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism.
  • No research can be included in more than one publication.

 

Publisher responsibilities

  • The publisher should ensure that editorial decisions on manuscript submissions are final, are only made based on professional judgment, and will not be affected by any commercial interests.
  • The publisher should monitor the ethics of the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers.
  • The publisher is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.

 

Editorial responsibilities

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_1.pdf)

  • Editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
  • Editors are responsible for the contents and overall quality of the publication.
  • Editors should always consider the needs of the authors and the readers when attempting to improve the publication.
  • Editors should guarantee the quality of the papers and the integrity of the academic record.
  • Editors should publish errata pages or make corrections when needed.
  • Editors should have a clear picture of a research's funding sources.
  • Editors should base their decisions solely on the paper's importance, originality, clarity, and relevance to the publication's scope.
  • Editors should not reverse their decisions nor overturn the ones of previous editors without serious reason.
  • Editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
  • Editors should ensure that all research material they publish conforms to internationally accepted ethical guidelines.
  • Editors should only accept a paper when reasonably certain.
  • Editors should act if they suspect misconduct, whether a paper is published or unpublished, and make all reasonable attempts to persist in obtaining a resolution to the problem.
  • Editors should not reject papers based on suspicions; they should have proof of misconduct.
  • Editors should not allow conflicts of interest between staff, authors, reviewers, and board members.

 

  • The editorial team should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
  • The editorial team should maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review or until they are published.
  • The editorial team should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
  • The editorial team should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
  • The editorial team should be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent data issues and willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
  • The editorial team must maintain the confidentiality of the content of the submitted articles until their publication.
  • The editor makes the final decision on whether or not to accept articles based on the opinions of the judges and editorial board members.
  • Due to the journal's review policy (Double-Blind), the anonymity of the judges and authors should be maintained.
  • The editorial team should not disclose the information and content of the articles to anyone other than the lead author, the reviewers, and, if necessary, other editorial staff.

 

Reviewers’ Responsibilities  

(https://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Peer%20review%20guidelines.pdf)

  • Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential and treat them as privileged information. The article review process is to be done anonymously.
  • Reviews should be conducted objectively, with no personal criticism of the author.
  • Reviewers should judge articles at the appropriate time and assist the editorial team in deciding whether or not to accept the article.
  • Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments
  • Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
  • Reviewers should also call to the editor-in-chief's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
  • Reviewers should not review 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 connected to the papers.

 


Authorship Criteria and Authors’ Responsibilities

(https://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/1999pdf13.pdf)

Authorship Criteria

 To ensure authorship for the submitted manuscripts, the contributors should meet the following three conditions:

  • Conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data have been done by the author.
  • Either drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content has been done by the author.
  • The author has given final approval for the version to be published. Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to be allowed to take public responsibility for suitable portions of the content.
 
Changes of Authorship
  • After an article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Chemistry Letters, no additional authors or changes to the first or corresponding authors are allowed. If an author wishes to be removed from the byline, he or she must submit a letter signed by the author and all other authors indicating their wish to be removed from the list of authors. Any change in the authors' order in the byline requires a letter signed by all authors indicating their agreement.

 

Authors’ Responsibilities
  • It is necessary to observe the basic principles of writing and research in writing articles, and articles should be written and arranged according to the format of the journal.
  • Authors must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere.
  • Authors must certify that the manuscript is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.
  • The corresponding author must confirm and submit the consent and knowledge of other co-authors of the article in this publication through the authors' commitment form.
  •  For the sustainability and development of the specialized review process, qualified authors are invited to participate in the review process of other articles in this journal.
  • Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
  • All Authors mentioned in the paper must have significantly contributed to the research.
  • Authors must state that all data in the paper are real and authentic.
  • Authors must notify the Editors of any conflicts of interest.
  • Authors should report the sponsor of the research (if any).
  • All authors should be aware that articles submitted to this journal are reviewed by similarity check software to prevent scientific misconduct.
  • Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscripts.
  • Authors must report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors.
  • Throughout the submission and peer review process, the corresponding author should promptly respond to editorial queries and cooperate with any requests from the journal after publication.

The Principles of Transparency

  • Study design and ethical approval

Good research should be well-justified, well-planned, appropriately designed, and ethically approved. To conduct research to a lower standard may constitute misconduct. The authors are responsible for the whole scientific content as well as the accuracy of the bibliographic information.

 

  • Data analysis

Data should be appropriately analyzed, but inappropriate analysis does not necessarily amount to misconduct. Fabrication and falsification of data do constitute misconduct.

 

  • Data Availability

Data availability statements should describe how readers can access the data supporting the conclusions of the study and clearly outline the reasons why unavailable data cannot be released. The data used to support the findings of the study should be available from the corresponding author upon request.

 

  •  Human and animal studies

All manuscripts reporting the results of experimental investigations involving human subjects should include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from each subject or subject’s guardian. All animal or human studies should be used after approval of the experimental protocol by a local ethics committee.

 

  • Conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest comprise those which may not be fully apparent and which may influence the judgment of the author, reviewers, and editors. They have been described as those which, when revealed later, would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived. They may be personal, commercial, political, academic, or financial. “Financial” interests may include employment, research funding, stock or share ownership, payment for lectures or travel, consultancies, and company support for staff.

 

  • Peer-review
    • This journal uses double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewers' and authors' identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity.
    • Authors have the right to communicate to the editor if they do not wish their manuscript to be reviewed by a particular reviewer because of potential conflicts of interest.
    • No article is rejected unless negative comments are received from at least two reviewers.
    • This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site. 

 

  • Archiving

The plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal's content is indicated. This policy sets out how the authors of the Journal of Chemistry Letters can archive copies of their work on their web pages, corporate web pages, and various other subject repositories. 

Journal of Chemistry Letters is an open-access license. Articles can be made available immediately according to the terms of their specific Creative Common license. Suppose an author has published an article under an Open Access license. In that case, the Journal of Chemistry Letters will encourage the author to share the Version of the Record on publication as opposed to the Accepted Manuscript.

Authors may also reuse the Abstract and Citation information (e.g. Title, Author name, Publication dates) of their article anywhere at any time, including social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and Twitter, providing that, where possible, a link is included back to the article on the Journal of Chemistry Letters site. Preferably, the link should be, or include, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which can be found in the Citation information about the article online. The accepted version may be placed on the author's website and/or the author's company/institutional repository or archive. Self-archiving of the submitted version is not subject to an embargo period.

Journal of Chemistry Letters is now formally archived at: 

 

  • Publishing schedule

Journal of Chemistry Letters publishes 4 issues per year. All the content from the beginning to the end will be available forever on the journal's exclusive website.

 

  • Privacy and Confidentiality
    • With the strictest consideration for the authors' confidentiality, all manuscripts must be reviewed.
    • While submitting manuscripts for review, authors entrust editors with the results of their creative and scientific labour, and their reputation and career may be on the line.
    • It may be a breach of the author's rights to disclose private information while the author's manuscript is being reviewed.
    • Editors must respect the reviewers' right to confidentially.
    • Confidentiality may need to be broken if there is a suspicion of fraud or dishonesty, but it must be upheld otherwise.
    • Editors are not permitted to reveal information regarding manuscripts (including their reception, content, status during the reviewing process, reviewer critique, or eventual outcome) to anybody but the authors and reviewers.
    • Before the article is published, reviewers and editorial staff must respect the authors' rights by abstaining from publicly criticizing or appropriating the authors' work.
    • Reviewers should only be permitted to share the manuscript with others if the editor permits them. They should not be permitted to make copies of the document for their files. 
    • Copies of manuscripts that have been rejected shouldn't be kept by editors. 
    • Reviewer comments should not be published or otherwise made public without the author, editor, and reviewer's consent.

 

  • Ownership and management

Publisher and Owner: 

 

  • Copyright and Licensing Statement

On the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge, this journal provides immediate access to its content.

All journal papers are released under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaption, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as the original author(s) and source are properly credited. Under an open-access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly. In this journal, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content without restrictions. 

 

  • Advertising

The policy of the journal is not to have advertising.

 

  • Corrections and retractions

To maintain the integrity of academic records, journals may have to publish corrections or retraction of papers published in journals. According to agreed academic community norms, corrections of published articles are made by publishing an Erratum or Retraction article without altering the original article in any other way than by adding a prominent connection to the Erratum / Retraction article. The original article remains in the public domain and should be commonly indexed to the subsequent Erratum or Retraction. We may have to delete the material from our website and archive sites in the event the material is considered to infringe those rights or is defamatory. It may be necessary for the original author(s) to make minor corrections to published articles by commenting on the published Article. It will only be acceptable if the modifications do not affect the article's results or conclusions.


Handling of Research Misconduct Allegations

Editor-in-Chief takes reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others.

  • The first action of the journal Editor is to inform the Editorial Office of the Journal of Chemistry Letters by supplying copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner.
  • If the author’s explanation is unacceptable and it seems that serious unethical conduct has taken place, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee via the Editorial Office.  After deliberation, the Committee will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions. 
  • If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the Publication Committee, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the author of Journal of Chemistry Letters publication policies; if the manuscript has been published, the Editor may request the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.
  • Notification will be sent to the corresponding author, and any work by the author responsible for the violation or any work these persons coauthored that is under review by the Journal of Chemistry Letters will be rejected immediately.
  • The authors are prohibited from serving on the Journal of Chemistry Letters editorial board and as reviewers for this Journal.
  • Journal of Chemistry Letters reserves the right to take more action.
  • In serious cases of fraud that result in the retraction of the article, a retraction notice will be published in the journal and will be linked to the article in the online version. The online version will also be marked “retracted” with the retraction date.

Possible Misconducts
  • Data Fabrication and Falsification

Data fabrication and falsification means the researcher did not carry out the study but made up data or results and recorded or reported the fabricated information. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but manipulated, changed, or omitted data or results from the research findings.

 

  • Duplicate Publication

Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions. 

 

  • Citation Manipulation

Excessive citations in a submitted manuscript that did not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and were included solely to increase citations to a given author's work or articles published in a particular journal are referred to as citation manipulation. This is a form of scientific misconduct since it misrepresents the importance of the specific work and publication in which it appears.

 

  • Simultaneous Submission:

Simultaneous submission occurs when a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal when it is already under consideration by another journal.

 

  • Redundant Publications:

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.

 

  • Improper Author Contribution or Attribution: 

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

 

  • Plagiarism

Plagiarism is intentionally using someone else’s ideas or other original material as if they are one's own.

  • Copying even one sentence from someone else’s manuscript, or even one of your own that has previously been published, without proper citation is considered by the Journal of Chemistry Letters Journal as plagiarism.
  • All manuscripts under review or published in the Journal of Chemistry Letters are subject to screening using plagiarism-prevention software. 
  • All submitted manuscripts are checked for similarity through a trustworthy software named iThenticate to be assured about their originality and then rigorously peer-reviewed by international reviewers. 
  • Thus, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. The authors are expected to check their manuscripts for plagiarism before submission.
  • If plagiarism is detected during peer review, the submission can be rejected.
  • If plagiarism is detected after publication, we reserve the right, as necessary, to issue a correction or retract the article.
  • We reserve the right to notify the institutions of authors about the plagiarism that was found before or after publication.

 


Complaint and Appeal Policy and Procedure

We encourage justifiable objections to editor judgment. However, to address the issues the editor and reviewers raised, you need to provide solid support or fresh data/information. Editors rarely change their minds after choosing and don't anticipate many appeals. Therefore, submitting your work to another journal is highly recommended if it is refused. Final choices made by the Editorial Board are usually final and cannot be changed because they are based on the objective opinions of the reviewers. However, if you think you have a good basis to appeal and you disagree with the publication's decision, do the following actions:

  • Explain your legitimate concerns and the reasons you think the decision was incorrect.
  • Please forward any further information or documents you would like the journal editors to take into account when conducting the review.
  • If you believe the reviewers made a mistake in evaluating your paper, please explain and include the relevant documentation.
  • Provide proof that there was an interest conflict throughout the arbitration procedure.  
  • For each article, the editors consider only one appeal. The editors may consult with the referees and other editors who read the work after receiving the appeal.
  • The editors and editorial board's decisions are final. They can result in the rejection of the article, a request for more peer review, or the need for the manuscript to be submitted in a changed version.

COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts  

Journal of Chemistry Letters is committed to following and applying guidelines and flowcharts of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in its reviewing and publishing process and issues. For more information on COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts, please see: (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts-new/translations). 

 

COPE’s Code of Conduct and Best Practices for Editors

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf),

(https://publicationethics.org/files/2008%20Code%20of%20Conduct.pdf)

  • Everything published in the journal is the responsibility of the editor-in-chief. This means that the editors must:
  • Strive to meet the needs of readers and authors;
  • Strive to improve their journal constantly;
  • Have processes in place to ensure the quality of the material they publish;
  • Champion freedom of expression;
  • Maintain the integrity of the academic record;
  • Preclude business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards;
  • Always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
Best Practices for Editors would include:
  • Actively seeking the views of authors, readers, reviewers, and editorial board members about ways of improving their journal’s processes.
  • Encouraging and being aware of research into peer review and publishing and reassessing their journal’s processes in the light of new findings.
  • Supporting initiatives designed to reduce research and publication misconduct.
  • Supporting initiatives to educate researchers about publication ethics.
  • Assessing the effects of their journal policies on author and reviewer behaviour and revising policies, as required, to encourage responsible behaviour and discourage misconduct.