Imam Sadiq University Academic Journals Ethics Statement

Introduction

    In regard to Imam Sadiq University approach to the production, publication, and updating of Islamic and human sciences, and providing answers for newly emerged demands of the revolution and Islamic government, its journals, as a component of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s publications, are bound to observe the related professional codes of conduct and comply with the “Research Ethics Guidelines” issued by the Research Assistance Branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran  Ministry of Sciences, Research and Technology, and the “Executive Regulations of Preventing Falsifications of Scientific Works” and the “Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)” . Hence, the major duties of those involved, namely author(s), director, editor-in-chief, the editorial board, and managing editor are briefly mentioned below.

Authors' Responsibilities

• Submitted manuscripts must be previously unpublished, domestically and internationally, in order to be approved for publication in ISU journals; they must be the original work of the author(s) and have exact sources and citations.
• The final responsibility of the full content of the submitted manuscript is with the author. It is appropriate to report the results of the article completely and take sufficient care about them and about their analysis. The article must contain enough details and resources to permit other researchers to have access to similar data for further research.
• The corresponding author is responsible, on behalf of all authors, for communication with the journal, dealing with the correspondence, and confirmation of the submission of four necessary files:

• The original article (without the authors’ names ,with guide for authors)
• Authors’ profiles (full names, scientific background, telephone number, academic email, ORCID ID)
• Signed Commitment Form (including the article title, author(s)’ full names and contact numbers, author order and their contribution share, corresponding author)
• Signed Conflict of Interest form
  • Before submitting the article, any possible conflict of interest affecting the research results and research analysis or the selection of editor- in- chief and reviewers must be mentioned and the funders of the research must be named.
  • Respect must be paid to the confidential assessment, and the disclosure of the author(s)' identity to the reviewers and vice versa must be avoided. In other words, the manuscript must avoid self- disclosing information to prevent reviewers from identifying the author(s).
  • Authorship information must be transparently and completely ensured and mentioned and non-contributors must be excluded.
  • Privacy, dignity, well-being and liberty of all those involved in the research must be preserved and supported and any threat posed to humans and other creatures must be declared.
  • The author must notify the journal officials of any error or inexactitude in time and set out to correcting them or withdrawing the whole manuscript.
  • The author(s) must clearly declare the originality of the work and its being free from plagiarism or being published previously.
  • The author(s) must submit a certification from Samimnoor database about similar articles to the publisher’s office.
  • AI tools such as ChatGPT, lacking in accountability for the work, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Use of such tools for writing, creating images and graphics and data analysis should be properly documented in the methods section and alternative parts of the manuscript. Besides, any use of such tools must comply with ethics standards of research and it must be assured that they do not jeopardize the content accuracy of the work. The author(s) must take the complete responsibility of their articles even the parts produced by AI.
  • Instances of unethical behavior in research and publication (research ethics breach):
• Fabrication: reporting unreal matters and providing fabricated data and results in the name of experimental and personal findings; unreal recording of events or replacing different research results.
• Falsification: recording and presenting research results in a way that the details or the process of data collection are manipulated, or some data are removed or changed, or some minor results are exaggerated to conceal facts in order to lead the research results to special objectives or to make the provided results accepted unquestionably.
• Plagiarism: appropriation of other writers' ideas and phrases, copying opinions, structural similarities in writing, borrowing ideas and findings of others without attribution or proper reference, or introducing them as an original scientific research.
• Scientific Hiring: employing other people to carry out the research in place of the author(s) and after some manipulation passing it off as one's own.
• Unreal affiliation: unreal affiliation of the author(s) to some organization or educational and research center which have not had any role in the fulfillment of the task.
• Duplicate Submission: an article or part of an article already published domestically or internationally or under review and publication.
• Overlapping Publication: publishing data or findings from previous articles with some alterations in another article under a new title.

Director's Responsibilities

• Pursuing free access to information given in the journal and extending its publication.
• Monitoring and pursuing the affairs of the editorial board and the editor-in-chief.
• Avoiding interference in the scientific review process.
• Avoiding interference in the scientific decisions of the editorial board and the editor- in-chief.
• Observing the material and intellectual rights of the authors, editor- in- chief, editorial board, reviewers, and executive members.
• Final confirmation of the submitted material for publication from a legal point of view.
• Avoiding disclosure of the article’s related data in proportion to his access level (data privacy principle).

Editorial Board Responsibilities

• Preserving the freedom and authority of the editor-in-chief in executing its duties independently, such as acceptance or rejection of received manuscripts with the assistance of the editorial board and observing the scientific merits of the article including the preservation of material and intellectual rights, research originality and editors' and reviewers' opinions.
• Attempting to promote and enforce regulations of ethics and soundness of research.
• Making an impartial judgment about articles, based on their contents rather than one’s personal biases or the author(s)’ nationality, sex, religion, ethnicity, and political standpoints.
• Receiving documentary evidence about the following conditions when accepting manuscripts from their authors.
• Granting the rights of publishing the article in the university journal.
• Possible conflict of interest form.
• Author(s)’ commitment form.
• Selecting qualified reviewers by relying on their specialties, scientific and professional experience, and also respecting the well-reasoned requests of the author(s) for special reviewers.
• Avoiding the disclosure of the information about the author(s) and reviewers and   discussing its details with others.
• Preventing any sort of conflict of interest in the reviewing process that could potentially affect the acceptance and publication of articles.
• Accurate assessment of works charged with breaching the codes by reviewers or other channels, and if necessary acting according to the pertinent research ethics rules.
• Procedures of dealing with unethical behavior in publication and research:
  

             9-1. Notifying the journal’s editorial board and sending letter to the corresponding author demanding clarification without any prejudgment.
            9-2. Allocating suitable time for receiving response from the author(s) charged with unethical publication and research behavior, and pursuing definite violations till the end.
             9-3. Referring the case to the editorial board in case of receiving unacceptable justifications from the author(s) for final decision as for the acceptance or rejection of the submitted manuscript.
             9-4. Based on the final decision of the editorial board,

• Sending written notification to the author and reminding him of the journal’s policy, or asking for corrections and making apology on the next journal issue.
• Sending warning to the corresponding author for rejecting any other work by the offender.
• Issuing apologetic announcement in the next printed issue of the journal and including it in the online version of the article which has been rejected due to its breach of research ethics. Both the article and its abstract are to be omitted (retraction).
• Trying to continuously improve the quality and ensure the integrity of the journal's content and pay respect to its administration and all the involved people and audience.
• Examining all received articles in due time.

Reviewers' Responsibility

• Assisting in the scientific quality and content analysis of the articles in order to improve its status.
• Applying professional knowledge and expertise related to the subject domain of the journal and declaring the rejection of submitted manuscripts to the editor-in-chief when it does not conform with the shared interests, be it financial, organizational, personal, or due to shortage of time for reviewing.
• Expressing expert and corrective opinions clearly, based on scientific evidence and sufficient reasoning in a definite time to the editor-in-chief and author(s), and avoiding partiality due to one's preferences, ethnicity, religious belief, professional inclination and otherwise in reviewing the submitted manuscripts.
• Avoiding the appropriation of the received data, discussions, explanations and ideas in the process of reviewing and even the unpublished information of the author(s) for personal gain.
• Avoiding submission of the article to other reviewers.
• Respecting the confidentiality of the reviewing process and avoiding the appropriation of the received information, discussions, explanations and ideas in the process of reviewing, or utilizing the new data and concepts derived from the article for or against one's own or other people's research or for criticizing or discrediting the author(s).
• Assisting the journal's editor-in-chief in providing a report on "unethical research and publication behavior "about the received manuscripts for review.
• Informing the editor-in-chief in case of a delay in reviewing the manuscripts and requesting more time allocation or selecting another reviewer.

Scientific- Research Journals' Office Management

• Establishing and announcing clearly one's publishing policies, especially in regard to the autonomy of the editor-in-chief in making decisions, publication ethics, safeguarding the intellectual property and copyright, conflict of interest, authors' duties, reviewers, editor-in-chief, editorial board, reviewing and decision making process, revision requests and complaints, preserving the scientific documents of the decision making process, preserving the authors' and reviewers' information , correcting or removing the accepted manuscripts, and solving disputes between the complainants and those accused of unethical research and publication behavior.
• Monitoring and pursuing research complaints for the university's journals.
• Assisting in ensuring the originality and soundness of the published articles in the university's journals.
• Avoiding disclosure of the article’s related data in proportion to one’s access level (data privacy principle).

• All publishing rights are exclusively granted to each of Imam Sadiq University journals. In case any author intends to send his article to be published in other compilations, he must request the written consent of the journal.
• Any violation of this right by republishing articles in hardcopy or electronic formats and sending their access links online without prior consent of Imam Sadiq University necessitates legal prosecution.