Authorship and Contributorship

1. Authorship
   1. Authorship denotes responsibility and accountability for published work, other that bestows credit. Credits are given to authors and contributors to clarify authors’ roles in taking responsibility and accountability for the article published. Each author should have contributed adequately to be publicly accountable for the content of the article.
   2. Authors and contributors are expected to perform the following functions:
      1. Make significant contributions to the conception, design, execution, data acquisition; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the study
      2. Draft the manuscript or revised it critically for important intellectual content
      3. Review and approve the final version of the manuscript 
      4. Agree to its submission for publication and to be accountable for all aspects related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work.
   3. The identification of the contributors who meet these criteria shall be made by the individual(s) who conduct the work or the institution(s) where the work was conducted. Editor-in-Chief is not responsible to determine the authorship or to arbitrate authorship conflicts. Any request by the authors to remove or add an author after article submission or publication shall be accompanied with an explanation and signed statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author to be removed or added.
   4. Other forms of contributions, such as technical help, proofreading, acquisition of funding alone, collection of data alone, and general supervision of the study alone do not meet the above criteria and therefore do not characterise authorship. Nonetheless, such contributions should be acknowledged in the “Acknowledgements” section.
   5. The corresponding author is the individual who takes the responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, as well as completing all required information for publication purposes, such as providing details of authorship and completing conflict of interest forms and statements. Other roles include responding to editorial queries in a timely manner, replying to critiques of the manuscript and accommodating any requests from the journal for data or additional information. 
2. Duties of Authors
   1. Authors should present the study accurately in terms of the work performed and the results. The manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to allow for replication of the study. Review articles should be accurate, objective and all-inclusive. Editorial opinion or perspective articles should be clearly indicated as such.
   2. Authors should be prepared to provide the raw data of their study, whenever required, for editorial review. It is expected that all data are accessible to peers for at least seven years after publication, usually via an institutional data repository or other data centre. The confidentiality of the participants is to remain protected and legal rights concerning proprietary data do not preclude their release.
   3. Authors should submit entirely original manuscript and ensure that the use of others’ ideas, work and words are properly cited. All forms of plagiarism are unethical and unacceptable.
   4. Authors should ensure that the work of others and publications that have been instrumental in the described work are properly acknowledged.
   5. Authors should not submit a manuscript that is under consideration by another journal. Concurrent submission of a manuscript to more than one journal is unethical and unacceptable.
   6. Authors should disclose any conflict of interest that might be interpreted to influence the results or their interpretation in the manuscript at the earliest stage possible. The authors are responsible for obtaining ethics committee and public disclosure approval from their respective institutions. All sources of financial support relevant to the work should be disclosed, including the name of the fund, the grant number or other identifying information in the manuscript.
   7. If animals or human participants were involved in the study, the authors should ensure that all procedures taken complied with relevant laws and appropriate approval has been obtained. Whenever experimentation with human participants was used in the study, the authors should have obtained informed consent from the participants. The manuscript should contain a statement(s) to these effects.
   8. Authors are responsible to cooperate and respond to editors’ requests during the peer review process. All responses to reviewers’ comments should be made in a timely manner.
   9. Whenever authors discover any fundamental errors or inaccuracies after their work has been published, the authors are required to promptly inform the Editor-in-Chief. The authors are to cooperate with the editors in ensuing course of action. If the errors or inaccuracies are discovered by a third party, the authors are also required to respond and cooperate with the Editor-in-Chief in resolving the issue. Authors may be required to provide evidence of the correctness of the article. Possible courses of action following the discovery may include correcting the article in the form or an erratum or retract the paper.

 

Data and Reproducibility 

1. Authors may provide data and/or related materials to enhance reporting in an article.
2. Questionable/Incorrect Data Practices:
   1. If an investigation report is received to recommend retraction of article due to questionable/incorrect data practices, Editor-in-Chief shall check the research work presented in the article, and find if there is anything obviously incorrect.
   2. If the investigation report shows sound evidence that the data is fake or manipulated, then the article shall be retracted.
   3. If the data is suspected not correct but no way to validate it, then Editor-in-Chief will issue an expression of concern.
3. Inappropriateness and Reproducibility Issue of Research Methodology
   1. If an investigation report is received to express concern on inappropriateness and reproducibility of research methodology, Editor-in-Chief shall contact the corresponding author of the article to provide a clear explanation of how the research is conducted so that it could be reproduced persistently by others.
   2. Editor-in-Chief will invite at least a post-publication peer review to specifically comment on the methodology that has been clarified by the authors.

 

Intellectual Property

1. All authors must declare that they are the rightful joint authors of an article, and that they are the joint copyright owners of the work.
2. Where the copyright ownership has passed to the employer as a work of an employee, it is the duty of the author to get a copyright release from the employer so that the copyright ownership can be fully assigned to the journal publisher.
3. Prior to publication of an article, the publisher shall obtain copyright assignment of the article from all authors/owners. Assignment must be signed and in writing. Assignment must be complete and in respect of all forms of exclusive rights without reserve, for all applicable duration, and in all jurisdictions in the world.
4. In return, the article will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
5. Where the authors own the copyright and database right to datasets used in the article, the authors are encouraged to make available to the public those datasets so that the analysis in the research can be replicated and that the datasets can be reused for other purposes. A suitable Creative Commons license may be used depending on the nature of the datasets.
6. The authors are expected to agree to indemnify the publisher and its assigns for any losses arising from an intellectual property infringement suit, as a result of intentional or unintentional action of one or more of the authors.

 

Plagiarism Policy

1. The Editor-in-Chief takes serious view over unethical authoring practices involving plagiarism.
2. Plagiarism includes self-plagiarism, whereby a substantial part of a submission by the same authors has already been published.
3. An article which has been published elsewhere shall not be accepted for publication in any circumstances.
4. The Editor-in-Chief shall decide, based on the usual conventions of the field of research, whether a paper presented at a conference is considered as publication.
5. The Editor-in-Chief should, as far as feasible, check the submissions for plagiarism, and in any case, before publication of an article.
6. Where minor borderline issues are detected, such as for the want of a reference, the editors should refer the matter back to the authors for appropriate corrective actions.
7. However, if serious plagiarism is detected, it is appropriate for the editors to reject the submission.

 

Duties of Editors and Editorial Board Members

1. Submitted manuscripts are evaluated solely on the basis of their academic merit and relevance to the journal’s scope.
2. The Editor-in-Chief has full authority over the entire editorial content of the journal and the timing of publication of that content.
3. Editors and editorial board members are responsible to ensure that any information about a submitted manuscript will not be disclosed to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, editorial team, and the publisher, as appropriate.
4. Editors and editorial board members will not use unpublished information disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their own research purposes.
5. The editors ensure that all submitted manuscripts being considered for publication undergo peer-review by at least two reviewers who are expert in the field.
6. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for deciding which of the manuscripts submitted to the journal will be published, based on the validation of the work in question, its importance to researchers and readers, the reviewers’ comments, and such legal requirements as are currently in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.
7. Editors will take responsive measures when ethical concerns are raised.

 

Duties of Reviewers

1. Peer review assists editors in making editorial decisions and, through editorial communications with authors, may assist authors in improving their manuscripts. It is an essential component of formal scholarly communication and lies at the heart of scientific endeavour.
2. Any invited referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should immediately notify the editors and decline the invitation to review so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.
3. Any manuscripts received for review are confidential documents and must be treated as such. This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.
4. Reviews should be conducted objectively and observations formulated clearly with supporting arguments so that authors can use them for improving the manuscript. Personal criticism of the authors is inappropriate.
5. Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that is an observation, derivation or argument that has been reported in previous publications should be accompanied by the relevant citation.
6. A reviewer should also notify the editors of any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other manuscript (published or unpublished) of which they have personal knowledge.
7. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for the reviewer’s personal advantage. This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.

 

Duties of Publisher

1. In cases of alleged or proven scientific misconduct, fraudulent publication or plagiarism, MMU Press, in close collaboration with the editors, will take all appropriate measures to clarify the situation and to amend the article in question.
2. MMU Press is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of scholarly research and ensures accessibility by partnering with organizations and maintaining our own digital archive.