Publication Policy and Ethical Principles

Ethical standards for publication exist to ensure high-quality scientific publications, public trust in scientific findings, and that people receive credit for their ideas. In addition, the authors are encouraged to follow the ethical guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

 

Plagiarism

By making a submission to JOFACS, authors have committed that the manuscript is original, i.e., material that has neither been published elsewhere nor is under review elsewhere. If any act of plagiarism is detected in the submitted manuscript, whether it is published or unpublished then authors will incur plagiarism sanctions.

All the submitted manuscripts are checked via plagiarism detection software.

 

Duplicate Submission

Manuscripts that are found to be published elsewhere, or to be under review in any other journal, will incur duplicate submission/publication sanctions. In the case of using their own previously published paper or a manuscript that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they are required to cite the previous work. Also, authors have the responsibility to convince the Editor(s) or reviewers regarding how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions beyond the previous ones.

 

Author Contribution or Attribution

All the significant contributors including students and laboratory technicians of the manuscript should be placed in the Authors. The contributions will be stated in the Declaration of Author Contribution form (will be received upon acceptance). Besides, the listed authors must contribute to the research at any stage of the preparation of the manuscript, and they should approve all its claims.

 

Sanctions

If there are documented violations of any of the above-mentioned policies in any journal, then regardless of whether the violations occurred in a paper published by JOFACS or not, the following sanctions will be applied:

-Immediate rejection of the infringing manuscript.

-Immediate rejection of every other manuscript submitted to JOFACS by any of the authors of the infringing manuscript.

 

-The prohibition against all the authors for any new submissions to JOFACS, either individually or in combination with other authors of the infringing manuscript, as well as in combination with any other authors. This prohibition will be imposed for a minimum of 2 years.

-Prohibition against all the authors from serving on the Editorial Board of JOFACS.

-In cases where the violations of the above policies are found to be particularly egregious, the publisher reserves the right to impose additional sanctions beyond those described above.

 

Editor's responsibilities

The Editor of the journal has exclusive rights regarding the fate of any submission before, during, or after the evaluation process. The Editor of the journal assigns Editors to submissions and manages the editorial flow during the publication process.

Publication decisions:

The editor is responsible for deciding which of the papers submitted to the journal will be published. The editor will evaluate manuscripts without regard to the authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy. The decision will be based on the paper’s importance, originality, clarity, self-containment, and validity of the study, and its relevance to the journal's scope. Current legal requirements regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism should also be considered.

Confidentiality:

The editor and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest:

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.

 

Reviewers' responsibilities

Contribution to editorial decisions

The peer-reviewing process assists the editor and the editorial board in making editorial decisions and may also serve the author to improve the paper.

Promptness

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and withdraw from the review process.

Confidentiality

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be disclosed to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.

 

Archiving Policy

JOFACS is accessed via the platform which utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

 

Publication Language

Manuscripts submitted to the journal should be written in English.

 

Publication Frequency

Every year one volume of JOFACS is published and issues of JOFACS will be published biannually (30th of June and December) for each publication year. Upon the decision of the Editorial Board, a Special Issue can also be published.

 

Fee Policy

All articles accepted to the JOFACS are published without charge for article submission, review, or printing.