Ethical Issues

We follow guidance from the Commission on Publication Ethics (COPE) in our policy and observe all the standards of academic integrity in the process of submission, reviewing and publishing. Editors comply with the standards of academic ethics. Authors are required to provide original unpublished and unsubmitted research based on accurate data and authorship. Significant contribution must have been made by each and every researcher included in the list of the authors in preparing the manuscript, authors share collective responsibility and accountability for the results. 

Authors while submitting a work, must declare any potential conflict of interests to the Editor. The journal follows a policy of the editors and reviewers not being involved in any kind of interaction such as previous recent co-authorship, participation in the same project, personal relationship, direct competition or advice for the improvement of the manuscript. If a conflict of interest is revealed during the peer-review stage, the journal may initiate rejection. If the paper has already been published, the retraction procedure may be initiated.

The editor-in-chief does not publish in the journal,  the number of papers submitted by the members of the editorial board as well as reseachers affiliated to Vytautas Magnus University is balanced in respect to external authors. We ask authors to provide information about financial support for the research or paper, if any. Acknowledgements for non-financial support are also welcome.

If a paper is based on a set data we invite authors to deposit the data in the repository of Vytautas Magnus University or anywhere else and to provide a persistent identifier to the archived data set. We comply with the General Data protection Regulation and protect sensitive personal data. Authors must obtain all the necessary consent from the participants of polls and experiments prior to submitting their paper.

Crossref members use Similarity Check which gives their editors reduced-rate access to Turnitin’s iThenticate system for plagiarism checking.