Publication Ethics

PUBLICATION ETHICS AND PUBLICATION MALPRACTICE STATEMENT

The ethical policy of Journal of Computer and Robotics (JCR) is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and obeys the International Committee of JCR Editorial Board codes of conduct. All readers, authors, reviewers and editors should always pay attention to these ethical policies when they work with JCR. The ethical policy of JCR is liable to determine which of the typical research papers or articles submitted to the journal should be published in the concerned issue. For more information on this matter in publishing and ethical guidelines please visit http://publicationethics.org

Responsibilities and Duties of Publisher

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Code%20of%20conduct%20for%20publishers%20FINAL_1_0.pdf)

1. Final Decision: JCR commits to ensure that editorial decisions on manuscript submissions are the final.
2. Academic Record: JCR commits to maintain the integrity of academic and research records.
3. Professional Judgment: JCR ensures that the decision on manuscript submissions is only made based on the professional judgment and will not be affected by any commercial interests.
4. Monitoring: JCR regularly monitors the ethics by Editor-in-Chief, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers.
5. Corrections: JCR is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.
6. Regular Checking: JCR is regularly checking the plagiarism and fraudulent contents issues involving in the submitted manuscripts.
7. Overall Directions: JCR is fully responsible for the overall and new directions of the journal.

Responsibilities and Duties of Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf)

1. Accepting/Rejecting a Manuscript: The Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief of the journal should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
2. Confidentiality: The Editorial board and Editor-in-Chief of the journal should maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review or until they are published.
3. Reviewers Papers: The Editorial board and Editor-in-Chief should take a decision on submitted manuscripts, whether to be published or not with reviewers
4. Anonymity: The Editorial board and Editor-in-Chief of the journal should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
5. Conflict of Interest: The Editorial board and Editor-in-Chief of the journal should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
6. Academic Integrity: The Editorial board and Editor-in-Chief of the journal should maintain academic integrity and strive to meet the needs of readers and authors.
7. Plagiarism and Fraudulent: The Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief of the journal should be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent contents issues and willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
8. Intellectual Content: The Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief of the journal should have the limit themselves only to the intellectual content.

9. Disclosing Information: The Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief 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.
10. Unpublished Materials: Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the Editor-in-Chief or the members of the Editorial Board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.

Responsibilities and Duties of Reviewers

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

1. Providing Comments: The reviewers should provide comments in time that will help Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief to make decision on the submitted manuscript to be published or not. The reviewer’s comments against each invited manuscript should be technical, professional and objective.
2. Confidentiality: The reviewers should maintain the confidentiality of manuscripts, which they are invited to review.
3. Assitance: The reviewers of the journal should assist the Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief in taking the decision for publishing the submitted manuscripts.
4. Peer Review: 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. 
5. Conflicts of Interest: The reviewers should not review the manuscripts in which they have found conflicts of interest with any of the authors, companies, or institutions. The Reviewers should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.

Responsibilities and Duties of Authors

(http://publicationethics.org/files/International%20standards_authors_for%20website_11_Nov_2011.pdf)

1. Grammar and Proper Terminology: Manuscripts must be submitted only in English and should be written according to sound grammar and proper terminology.
2. Publishing Elsewhere: 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. The submitted manuscripts are not currently under consideration by another journals or any other publisher.
3. Corresponding Author: The submitting corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the manuscript article's publication has been approved by all the other co-authors.
4. Obligation to Participate: In order to sustain the peer review system, authors have an obligation to participate in peer review process to evaluate manuscripts from others. 
5. Particular Institution: 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.
6. Readability: It is a condition for submission of a manuscript that the authors permit editing of the paper for readability.
7. Financial Supports: Authors are requested to clearly identify any financial support for the conduct of research and/or preparation of the manuscript and briefly describe the role of the founder/ sponsor in any part of the work.
8. Copy Right: A copy right release form must be signed by the corresponding author in case of multiple authorship, prior to the acceptation of the manuscript, by all authors, for publication to be legally responsible towards the Journal ethics and privacy policy.
9. Open Access: Under open access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content, but allow anyone to download, reuse and reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly.
10. Corresponding Author: All authors have agreed to allow the corresponding author to serve as the correspondent with the editorial office, to review the edited manuscript and proof.
11. Significant Errors: When 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. 
12. Plagiarism Prevention: All authors must know that that the submitted manuscripts under review or published with JCR are subject to screening using Plagiarism Prevention Software. Plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. 
13. Final Checklist: All authors must ensure that they have read the submission final checklist before being submitted to JCR.  For more details kindly see the link: http://qjcr.ir/journal/authors.note).

Principles of Transparency

(http://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Principles_of_Transparency_and_Best_Practice_in_Scholarly_Publishing.pdf)

1. Governing Editorial Board: JCR has very strong Editorial Board, whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the members are provided on the journal’s Web site (http://qjcr.ir/journal/editorial.board).
2. Contact information: Journal is provided with the contact information for the editorial office of JCR (http://qjcr.ir/journal/about).
3. Author fees / Access: The Journal database is fully open access and full text of published articles are available for everyone who can get access to the Journal website free of cost. Besides, the authors never pay any charges for submission, article processing and publication.
4. Peer review process: JCR is a double blind peer reviewed electronic and print semi-annualy publication concerned with all aspects of environmental science and management. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site (http://qjcr.ir/journal/process).
5. Copyright: Journals made clear the type of copyright under which authors work will be published.  Upon acceptance of manuscript, authors will be asked to complete a 'Journal Publishing Agreement' (http://qjcr.ir//WebUsers/qjcr/news/Copyright%20policy_3.pdf).
6. Allegations of Research Misconduct: The Editorial Board and Editor-in-Chief take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where any research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and contents falsification/fabrication, among others.
7. Web Site: A journal’s Web site (http://qjcr.ir/) contains that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards.
8. Name of Journal: The Journal of Computer and Robotics (JCR) has unique name and not be one that is easily confused with another journal
9. Conflicts of Interest: Authors are requested to evident whether impending conflicts do or do not exist while submitting their articles to JCR through Conflict of Interest Disclosure form (www. qjcr.ir /conflict_of_interest_discloure_form.docx).
10. Publishing Schedule: The periodicity at which this journal publishes is clearly indicated (http://qjcr.ir/journal/about).
11. Archiving: A journal’s plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content is clearly indicated (http://qjcr.ir/).

Publication Policies and Violation of Ethics

(http://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Full%20set%20of%20flowcharts.pdf)

1. 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 JCR as plagiarism. All manuscripts under review or published with JCR are subject to screening using plagiarism prevention software. Thus, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. The development of CrossCheck is a service that helps editors to verify the originality of papers. CrossCheck is powered by the Ithenticate software from iParadigms, known in the academic community as providers of Turnitin.  For a searchable list of all journals in the CrossCheck database, please visit: www.ithenticate.com/search
2. Contents/Data Fabrication and Falsification: Contents fabrication and falsification means the researcher did not really carry out the study, but made up data or results and had 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.
3. 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.
4. Duplicate Publication: Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions.
5. Redundant Publications: Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.
6. Improper Author Contribution or Attribution: All listed authors of a manuscript must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.
7. Citation Manipulation: Citation Manipulation is including excessive citations, in the submitted manuscript, that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and have been included solely for the purpose of increasing citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal. This leads to misrepresenting the importance of the specific work and journal in which it appears and is thus a form of scientific misconduct.
8. Sanctions: In the event that there are documented violations of any of the above mentioned policies in any journal, regardless of whether or not the violations occurred in a journal, the following sanctions will be performed: (a) Immediate rejection of the infringing manuscript; (b) Immediate rejection of every other manuscript submitted to any journal published by any of the authors of the infringing manuscript; (c) Prohibition will be imposed for a minimum of three years against all of the authors for any new submissions to JCR, either individually or in combination with other authors of the infringing manuscript, and (d) Prohibition against all of the authors from serving on the Editorial Board of any journal.

Handling Cases of Misconduct

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Sharing%20_of_Information_Among_EiCs_guidelines_web_version.pdf)

Once JCR confirms a violation against JCR publication ethics, JCR addresses ethical concerns diligently following an issue-specific standard practice as summarized below.

1. Ask for Explanation: The first action of the Editor-In-Chief is to inform the Editorial Office of JCR by supplying copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner.
2. Future Submissions: 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 Editorial Office. After deliberation, the Committee will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions. 
3. Reprimanding and Reminding: If the infraction is less severe, the Editor-In-Chief, upon the advice of the Publication Committee, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds JCR publication policies. If the manuscript has been published, the Editor may request the corresponding author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.
4. Notification: A notification will be sent to corresponding author and any work by the author responsible for the violation or any work these persons co-authored that is under review by JCR will be rejected immediately.
5. More Actions: The authors are prohibited from serving on JCR editorial board and serving as a reviewer for JCR. JCR reserves the right to take more actions.
6. Extreme Cases: In extreme cases, the notification will be sent to the affiliations of the authors and the authors are prohibited from submitting their work to JCR for 5 years.
7. Retraction Notice: In serious cases of fraud that result in 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.