Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad’s publication ethics and publication malpractice statement has been developed with guidance from the Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors (Committee on Publication Ethics, 2011).

Editors' Responsibilities

Publication Decisions and Editorial Independence

The Editor decides which manuscripts submitted to the journal will be published. The decision will be based quality of submissions and appropriate peer review, including the paper’s importance, originality, clarity, and potential impact. The Editor evaluates manuscripts without regard to the authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy, and free from any political, financial, or personal influences held by the Editor or other journal or publisher staff or volunteer leaders. The Editor is expected, to the best of their knowledge, to ensure that nothing in the Journal violates any proprietary rights or copyright or is in conflict with policies and requirements set forth by the journal.

Confidentiality

The Editor and any editorial staff or volunteer leaders will not disclose information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers (e.g., board members), and the publisher.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

Editors, Editorial Board members, and staff will not use information gained through working with manuscripts for private gain. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the Editors or the members of the Editorial Board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent. The Editor and Editorial Board Members are asked to assent to the journal’s Conflict of Interest Policy and disclose any potential conflicts of interest to journal staff upon assuming their role and upon each renewal of a subsequent term.

Reviewers' Responsibilities

Contribution to Editorial Decisions

The peer review process assists the Editor in making decisions about whether or not to publish a submitted manuscript and can also help the author in improving the paper. Peer Reviewers are asked to prepare their feedback on a submitted manuscript in accordance with the journal’s Peer Review Policy and using the document For Peer Reviewers: Writing the Review as their guide.

Promptness

If an invited peer reviewer feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that they are unable to meet the deadline set by the Editor, the peer reviewer should notify the editor and withdraw from the review process immediately.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts and any associated materials received for review must be treated as confidential and cannot be disclosed to or discussed with others except as authorized by the Editor in writing.

Standards of Objectivity

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author(s) is inappropriate. Peer reviewers are asked to justify their comments in detail and cite supporting references where available.

Acknowledgement of Sources

Reviewers are asked to identify cases in which relevant previously published work referred to in the paper has not been properly cited. Reviewers should notify the Editor of any similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published work of which they have personal knowledge.

Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

Peer reviewers or potential peer reviewers should not use information gained through working with manuscripts for private gain. Peer Reviewers are asked to assent to the journal’s Conflict of Interest Policy and disclose any potential conflicts of interest to journal each time they are invited to review a manuscript.

Authors' Duties

Reporting Standards

Authors submitting original research reports should present an accurate, reproduceable account of the work performed. Underlying data must also be represented accurately in the manuscript. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements are unethical and unacceptable.

Data Access and Retention

Authors should retain the raw data underlying submitted manuscripts and be prepared to make the data publicly available, if practicable, for at least ten years after publication, provided that the confidentiality of participants can be protected and legal rights to proprietary data do not preclude their release.

Originality, Plagiarism and Acknowledgment of Sources

Authors must submit only original works and appropriately cite or quote the work and/or words of others where applicable. Other previous publications that have been influential in preparing or interpreting the work represented in the submitted manuscript should also be cited.

Multiple, Redundant, or Concurrent Publication

Manuscripts reporting the same research should not be published in more than one journal; submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal – whether simultaneously or sequentially – constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. Manuscripts which have been published as copyrighted material elsewhere cannot be submitted to Frontiers. In addition, manuscripts under review by Frontiers should not be resubmitted to other copyrighted publications.

In the case of publication, author(s) retain the rights to material published in Frontiers under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License, which means that users may read, copy, and distribute the work in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes, provided the authors and the journal are appropriately credited. The users are not allowed to remix, transform, or build upon the published material.

Authorship of the Manuscript

Only those individuals who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study should be listed as authors on a submitted manuscript. All who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Author(s) are asked to identify a single corresponding author who is responsible for ensure that all contributing co-authors and no uninvolved persons are included in the author list. The corresponding author on a manuscript is responsible for verifying that all co-authors have approved the final version of the manuscript and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

All authors listed on a manuscript should disclose any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that may be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript at the time of submission. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed as early in the process as possible, which usually means including them in an Acknowledgments section of the manuscript upon submission, unless disclosure of that information would imperil the anonymity of the double-blind peer review process.

Errors in Published Works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published work, they must promptly notify the Editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper in form of an erratum as needed.

Publisher’s Responsibilities

Handling of Unethical Publishing Behavior

In cases of alleged or proven scientific misconduct, fraudulent publication, or plagiarism, the publisher will collaborate with the Editor(s) to take appropriate measures to clarify the situation and to amend the article in question, which may include the prompt publication of an erratum, clarification, or even the retraction of the work. The publisher, together with the Editor(s), shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, and under no circumstances encourage such misconduct or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place.

Access to Journal Content

The publisher is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of scholarly research and ensures accessibility by retaining multiple copies of published work on our own digital archive, backed up by cloud-based servers, and registering journal content for persistent Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and depositing metadata through our membership in Crossref. 

References

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). (2011, March 7). Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. Retrieved from http://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf

 

adopted: August 10, 2021