Editors and publisher of the journal believe that ethical guidelines should be respected in the publishing of academic journals. With these guidelines, the quality of the journals can be guaranteed. Science needs to be reliable and based on the right resources. To prevent articles from being unrightly duplicated or being subject to any other misconduct, every party involved in the publishing has to behave according to the ethical guidelines.
Conflicts of interest
Reliability of the articles is important, and thus any conflict of interest on the side of the author, peer-reviewer or the editors should be avoided. These conflicts of interest can be on the personal, financial, political, academic or religious level. Authors, peer-reviewers or editors should, whenever these are relevant to the content being considered or published, declare their interests and affiliations, so that the appropriate measures can be taken by the editorial board. If needed, a statement can be made in the journal that a certain person has a personal, financial, political, academic or religious conflict of interest with the topic.
One of the measures that the editorial board can take when there is a conflict in interests is to change the persons who are involved in peer-reviewing the article. Authors can also be prevented to publish their article in the journals. The existence of a conflict of interest should however not prevent someone of being included in the list of authors, if they qualify for authorship.
Funding
Readers should know who funded the research project or the publication of a document. This can be a charity or government department, university or commercial company. And so:
-Funders of a paper, in the form of persons, organizations or companies or any other form should be mentioned.
-The role of the research funders or any other research contributors in the design or preparation of the article should be mentioned, if they are not mentioned in the list of authors. They can, for example, be mentioned in acknowledgment.
-If a funder wants to publish a supplement or separate section in a magazine, they should ask for permission of Lectito Journals. Applications will be handled case by case.
Authors
-Contributors and their sources have to be properly acknowledged in the article according to guidelines. Guidelines on notes and references can be found under the submission guidelines of the respected journal.
-Authors of research papers should state whether they had complete access to the research data that support the article and if not, they should state this in the article.
-Authors and contributors should have approved the acknowledgment of their contribution.
-When the article is written by a group of authors, the individual authors who have direct responsibility for the manuscript should be mentioned. When a group author manuscript is submitted, the corresponding author should indicate the preferred citation of the group name as well the names of the individual authors.
Confidentiality
It is important that authors and peer-reviewers handle the information carefully and that informants and research subjects are protected.
-Across the scholarly disciplines, there are variations in practice and standards around privacy and confidentiality. In biomedical sciences, authors should only publish information and images from individual participants where the individual has given his or her free, prior informed consent. In social sciences, it is not always possible to gain written consent. However, authors should strive to treat the privacy of research objects with as much care as possible.
Authors should be careful in publishing images of objects that might have cultural significance and cause offense (as in for example religious texts). Lectito has the right to refuse articles that may cause offense or violations of human dignity.
-Lectito encourages authors to provide a statement in which they identify the ethics committee that approved that the study, however we recognise that not all universities require research to go through a formal ethical review process. We expect authors to submit articles which conform to recognized standards of research in their given country in which considerations are given to inform participants about how and why the research is being done, and protect participants from harm. Lectito will not check that this has been done although we will raise a concern with authors through the peer review process, if we feel that the research was conducted in an exploitative way.
Misconduct and copyright
Editors of the journal has the right to alert potential misconduct to appropriate agents (for example, funders, employers or the editorial board). Authors and peer-reviewers have the right to respond to allegations and for investigations to be carried out with diligence. An allegation should be substantiated and proved right or wrong by the editors.
-When errors affect the interpretation of information, the journal has the right to publish 'corrections' (errata), whatever the cause of the error. Likewise, the journal has the right to publish 'retractions' if work is proven to be fraudulent or 'expressions of concern' when there is a suspicion of misconduct. Depending on the size of the misconduct, the author's institution may be informed, and the author can be refused for a time to publish in the journals of Lectito Journals.
-Plagiarism or duplication of another text is forbidden even if it is an author's previous publication. Plagiarism includes misappropriation or theft of intellectual property by copying another's work. Authors must thereby avoid duplication of another's research and must always make explicit what the source of their information is. The way to refer to sources is set out by the submission guidelines of the journal. The journal has the right to refuse publishing articles that are suspected of duplicating another's work. The journal cooperates with iThenticate o detect plagiarism.
Duplication is not appliable to the copying of information from a university dissertation or thesis, posters or abstracts or results presented at meetings, provided that it is the author's own work. Results in databases and clinical trials registries can also be duplicated.
-Authors that translate and publish material that has been published elsewhere should ensure that they have appropriate permission. They should always identify the source of the original material.
Peer review process
The journal applies a double-blinded peer review procedure, which means that both the identity of the reviewer and that of the author are concealed from the other reviewers before, during and after the review process.
-Editorial staff should never be involved in editorial decisions about their own work.
-Editorial staff (including peer reviewers) should withdraw from discussions about submissions where any circumstances might prevent them from offering unbiased editorial decisions.
-Peer reviewers, who regularly produce poor quality work, will be removed from the editorial board. Poor quality work includes work that is tardy, abusive, unconstructive or work that is handed in too late.
-It is allowed that peer-reviewers delegate peer-review to members of their staff, provided that they inform the editor of the journal about it.
-Editors may choose a peer-reviewer who is suggested by the author but are not obligated to follow the author's request. Likewise, authors may suggest that a certain peer-reviewer is not used, but this does not give any guarantees that this suggestion is followed by the editor.
-Peer-review comments or published correspondence should not contain personal attacks on the authors.
-To protect the author, a submitted manuscript should be destroyed by the peer-reviewer after they have reviewed it.
-Authors do not have the right to veto comments about their work, preferred that the comment is not a personal attack on the author himself.
-If agreement during the peer-review process cannot be reached, editors may invite one or multiple other peer-reviewers to review the article. The editor's decision following such an appeal is final.