Publishing Ethics & Malpractice Statement
Journal of Studies in Language, Culture and Society (JSLCS) is committed to ensuring that all works published in the journal are of the highest quality and scrutinised under the highest ethical standards. In our ethical standards and procedures, we set out general expectations for authors, editors, reviewers, publishers, and society partners.
JSLCS journal ethics statements are based on laws and practices set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Journal of Studies in Language, Culture and Society (JSLCS) is fully committed to good publication practice and assumes the task of fulfilling the following duties and responsibilities.
- EDITORIAL RESPONSABILITIES
- Accountability and Responsibility for Journal Content
Editor in-Chief of the journal or the Associate Editors have a full responsibility and authority to reject, or accept an article. They should take full responsibility for everything they publish and should have procedures and policies in place to ensure the quality of the material they publish, including copyright infringement , and plagiarism. The editor may confer with the members of the Editorial Board or reviewers in making this decision.
- Fair Review
The Editor-in-Chief has to ensure that each received manuscript is evaluated on its intellectual content without regard to race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.
- Confidentiality
The Editor-in-Chief, the members of the Editorial Board and any editorial staff must protect the confidentiality of authors’ material and remind reviewers to do so as well. As such, they must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the authors of the manuscript, reviewers, potential reviewers…etc or with editors of other journals, unless with the authors’ agreement or in cases of alleged misconduct.
- Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest
Editors should have policies that require all authors to declare any relevant financial and non-financial conflicts of interest and publish at least those that might influence a reader’s perception of a paper, alongside the paper.
- REVIEWERS RESPONSABILITIES
- Contribution to Editorial Decisions
Reviewers play a vital role in judging the quality of submitted manuscripts along with the support of Editorial Board Members through Peer-Review process. Peer review process assists the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board in making editorial decisions. To improve the quality of the journal, reviewers’ identities are not revealed to the authors they remain anonymous. Their identities are known only to the Editor-In-Chief and Assistant Editor-In-Chief. Besides, their comments to the editors are confidential.
- Reviewers’ Actions
Reviewers’ comments should support one of the following mentioned acts. The reviewed manuscript can be accepted for publication, accepted with minor revision, accepted with major revision. In other cases the reviewer can reject the manuscript.
- Competence
Reviewers need not be expert in every aspect of a manuscript’s content; accordingly, if they realize that their knowledge on the subject of the paper under the reviewing process is limited, they should make their degree of competence clear to the editor. This can be achieved via a decline to review the paper across the platform ASJP.
- Confidentiality
The manuscripts received for review will be treated as confidential documents. They will not be shown to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.
- Standards of Objectivity/ Unbiased Comments
The reviewers’ provided comments and feedback have to be relevant to increase the quality of manuscript. They should be specific and detail while providing comments. The provided comments provided have to be transparent, unbiased and should not involve personal or professional conflicts.
- Acknowledgement of Sources
Reviewers should ensure that the article cites all relevant work by other scientists. Their role during the peer review process is to detect any instance of plagiarism. In case of an overlap between the manuscript under the reviewing process and any other published paper, the reviewer should also call to the editor's attention.
- Disclosure and Conflict of Interest
Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider 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.
- AUTHORS RESPONSABILITIES
- Reporting standards
Authors are requested to submit original research. They have to meticulously present the research work as well as highlighting significance of the research work. Accordingly, they are recommended to accurately display the research data, provide sufficient detail and references to permit other researchers to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.
- Originality and Plagiarism
- Originality: authors have to certify that their manuscript is their original work. Additionally, they should declare that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere, or even submitted and been in reviewed in another journal.
- Plagiarism: It occurs when authors presents others’ works including data, text, theories etc… as if they were their own without proper acknowledgment, or referencing. Plagiarism is of different degrees ranging from the unreferenced use of others’ published and unpublished ideas to the submission under “new” authorship of a complete paper, sometimes in a different language. This kind of practice applies to print and electronic versions.
In accordance with, authors must acknowledge and refer in their list of reference to all sources used in the creation of their manuscript. JSLCS reserves the right to use plagiarism detecting software to screen submitted papers at all times.
- Duplicate, Redundant or Concurrent Submission/ Publication
It envelopes the action of submitting the same manuscript to two journals or publishing more or less the same study in two journals. This means that authors are not permitted to republish the same findings repeatedly. Within the same scope, they should not divide one research project into many little papers (“salami slicing”)
- Data Access and Retention
Retention and access to the raw data of the submitted paper is under the authors’ total control. They should retain it for a while (before publication); however, they must provide it for editorial review if requested by the editorial board.
- Research Misconduct
- Data Fabrication: This concerns the making up of research findings better say the Invention of data or cases.
- Data Falsification: it concerns the manipulation of research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This area of research misconduct encompasses the manipulation of images such as micrographs, removing outliers or “inconvenient” results, changing, adding or omitting data points, etc.
However, authors are allowed to manipulate images for the sake of improving the image readability by adjusting colors, brightness, contrast etc. Or/ in case of any other purposeful data manipulation, the author should notify it in the cover letter to the Journal Editor upon submission.
- Authorship Issues
Authorship of a scientific paper indicates that the authors should be credited with creation of new knowledge, offering new solutions, or providing novel insights. Correspondingly, authorship should be limited only to those who have made a significant contribution to conceiving, designing (according to the template that is loaded via the ASJP platform), executing and/or interpreting the submitted study.
- Disclosure of Potential Conflict of Interests
A conflict of interest is a set of conditions that can be personal, academic, financial in which professional judgement concerning a primary interest (such as the validity of a research study) tends to be excessively influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain).
It is recommended that authors disclose all relationships or interests that could influence or bias the work. Although an author may not feel there are conflicts, disclosure of relationships and interests affords a more transparent process, leading to an accurate and objective assessment of the work.
