Publication ethics

Ethical standards for publication exist to ensure high-quality scientific publications, public trust in scientific findings, and that people receive credit for their work and ideas. The guidelines and core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) are adhered to.

Article assessment

All manuscripts are subject to peer review and are expected to meet standards of academic excellence. If approved by the editor, submissions will be considered by peer reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors.

Advice will occasionally be sought outside standard peer review, for example, on submissions with serious ethical, security, biosecurity, or societal implications. We may consult experts and the academic editor before deciding on appropriate actions, including but not limited to recruiting reviewers with specific expertise, assessment by additional editors, and declining to further consider a submission.

Plagiarism

Authors must not use the words, figures, or ideas of others without attribution. All sources must be cited at the point they are used, and reuse of wording must be limited and be attributed or quoted in the text. All submitted manuscripts will be subjected to a plagiarism check that will be done by AJSTSS. In a manuscript, sources should be cited. The similarity index report should not exceed 15%. Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will be rejected and the authors may incur sanctions. Any published articles may need to be corrected or retracted.

Duplicate submission and redundant publication

AJSTSSconsiders only original content, i.e. articles that have not been previously published, including in a language other than English. Articles based on content previously made public only on a preprint server, institutional repository, or in a thesis will be considered.

Manuscripts submitted to AJSTSS must not be submitted elsewhere while under consideration and must be withdrawn before being submitted elsewhere. Authors whose articles are found to have been simultaneously submitted elsewhere may incur sanctions.

If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they must cite the previous articles and indicate how their submitted manuscript differs from their previous work.

Corrections and retractions

When errors are identified in published articles, the publisher will consider what action is required and may consult the editors and the authors’ institution(s).

Errors by the authors may be corrected by a corrigendum and errors by the publisher by an erratum.

If there are errors that significantly affect the conclusions or there is evidence of misconduct, this may require retraction or an expression of concern following the COPE Retraction Guidelines.

All authors will be asked to agree to the content of the notice.