Publishing Ethic Statement

Journal of Library and Information Science in Agriculture (JLISA) is a single blind peer-reviewed academic journal with severe peer-review procedure. JLISA is committed to ethical scientific publication to help authors publish ethically. Authors, editors, and reviewers are expected to be aware of, and comply with, best practice in publication ethics. Publishing Ethic Statement of JLISA follows COPE flowcharts and ICMJE Recommendations.

I. RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF EACH AGENT 

1 DEFINING THE ROLE OF AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

JLISA follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines for authorship criteria.

·  Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;

·  Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;

·  Final approval of the version to be published;

·  Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged individually. Examples of activities maybe include “acquisition of funding”, “general supervision of a research group or general administrative support”, “writing assistance”, “technical editing”, “language editing”, et al.

2 EDITOR RESPONSIBILITIES

· Editors should follow the relevant national regulations and comply with publishing ethical norms strictly. Also they need to deal with all contributions openly and timely.

· Editors should not be prejudiced against authors' occupation, unit, gender, professional title, academic honor and so on.

· Editors should protect the information of authors' contributions and identity information of reviewers and other concerned people in editorial office.

· Editors should select manuscripts fairly and justly. The criteria should only be papers’quality and theme matching.

· Editors have the responsibility to investigate academic misconducts and take effective measures.

3 REVIEWER RESPONSIBILITIES

· Reviewers should review the manuscripts accurately, make objective comments and put forward revising ideas, helping editors to screen manuscripts and authors to improve papers’ quality.

· Reviewers should respect the authors' contributions and avoid the manuscript with conflict of interest. 

· Reviewers should provide comments timely and respond to editorial office within the fix time. If not, any difficulty should be reported to editorial office.

· The procedure of manuscripts processing must be remain secret. Discussing or disseminating the data,viewpoints and conclusions in manuscripts is forbidden.

· All of the experts' comments must remain secret. Personal use is not available.

II. SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT 

Scientific misconduct includes but is not necessarily limited to Plagiarism, Fabrication and Falsification, Duplicate Submission, Redundant Publication, and Undeclared Conflict of Interest. When scientific misconduct is alleged in submitted or published papers, the editor should initiate appropriate procedures in accordance with the guidelines of COPE.

1 PLAGIARISM 

Plagiarism is a form of piracy that involves the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language (figures images or tables) and thoughts of others and the representation of them as one’s own original work without permission or acknowledgment by the author of the source of these materials.

Action for dealing with suspect plagiarism:

· Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript (Link)

· Suspected plagiarism in a published article (Link)

2 FABRICATION AND FALSIFICATION 

Fabrication refers to the invention, recording, or reporting of data. Falsification refers to the alteration of research materials, equipment, protocols, data, or results.

Action for dealing with suspect fabricated data

· Suspected fabricated data in a submitted manuscript (Link)

· Suspected fabricated data in a published article (Link)

3 DUPLICATE SUBMISSION AND REDUNDANT PUBLICATION 

Duplicate submission refers to the practice of submitting the same manuscript, in the same or different languages, simultaneously to more than one journal. Redundant publication refers to the situation that one study is split into several parts and submitted to two or more journals. Or the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross-referencing, permission or justification. “Self-plagiarism” is considered a form of redundant publication. It concerns recycling or borrowing content from previous work without citation.

Recommended action for dealing with suspect redundant (duplicate) publication

· Suspected redundant publication in a submitted manuscript (Link)

· Suspected redundant publication in a published article (Link)

4 UNDECLARED CONFLICT OF INTEREST 

Authors and reviewers should declare all conflicts of interest relevant to the work under consideration (i.e. relationships, both financial and personal, that might interfere with the interpretation of the work) to avoid the potential for bias.

Recommended action for dealing with undeclared conflict of interest

· What to do if a reviewer suspects undisclosed conflict of interest in a submitted manuscript (Link)

· What to do if you suspect a reviewer has appropriated an author’s idea or data (Link)

· What to do if a reader suspects undisclosed conflict of interest in a published article (Link)

III. APPEALS 

JLISA has established and published a mechanism for authors to appeal editorial decision, facilitate genuine appeals, and discourage repeated or unfounded appeals.

· Editors should allow appeals to override earlier decisions only when new information becomes available (for example, additional factual input by the authors, revisions, extra material in the manuscript, or appeals about conflicts of interest and concerns about biased peer review). Author protest alone should not affect decisions. Reversals of decisions without new evidence are avoided.

· Editors should mediate all exchanges between authors and peer reviewers during the peer-review process. Editors may seek comments from additional peer reviewers to help them make their final decision.

VI. CORRECTIONS 

JLISA encourage readers and authors to notify them if they find errors, especially errors that could affect the interpretation of data or information presented in an article. When an error is identified:

·  Journal should work with authors to correct important published errors.

·  Journal should publish corrections when important errors are found, and should consider retraction when errors are so fundamental that they invalidate the work.

VII. RETRACTIONS 

Retractions publish when errors could affect the interpretation of data or information, or if work is proven to be fraudulent, or in other cases of serious ethical misconduct (for example, duplicate or redundant publication, failure of all authors to agree to publication, or plagiarism). JLISA follow the COPE Guidelines for Retracting Articles.