Ethical and Scientific Editorial Standards

To meet ethical and scientific editorial standards and to counteract unfair practices, the IB PAS Publishing House established binding rules for editors, authors and reviewers (following the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics – COPE).

Editors' Responsibilities

Editors are obliged to:

• sent manuscripts to reviewers;
• ensure that the peer review process is timely;
• remain objective and evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors;
• inform promptly the authors about the acceptance of the submitted manuscript and whether it requires revision (information about necessary corrections, changes etc.), or about its rejection, without violating the authors' dignity.

Responsibilities of Authors

Authors of papers/monographs submitted to the IB PAS Publishing House must:

• remember that authorship is limited to those who have made a substantial contribution to a study (conception, design, acquisition, analysis, interpretation of data, drafting and revising the article), while other persons who have participated in such aspects of the research as organization of and assistance at field work, data collection, or verification of the text should be recognized in the acknowledgement section with a mention about their contribution;
• ensure that they have written an entirely original work, declaring that the submitted article is not someone else's work (as a whole, or in part) and that it has not been copied from previous work by the author(s), i.e. it was not published elsewhere as a whole, or partially;
• declare that presented data are genuine and were collected and processed in accordance with the described methods of research and that the presented results are objective;
• list the institutional affiliation of the main author and co-authors;
• when after the publication of the work, significant errors are discovered in their published article, the author(s) is(are) requested to inform promptly the Editors about this fact, so as the errors could be corrected, or errata to the article published.

In addition, the author(s) should provide information about research funding and contribution of scientific-research institutes, or other entities to research execution. The list of authors should be ordered according to their contribution to the work (conception, design, data processing and interpretation).

Responsibilities of Reviewers

Reviewers are obliged to:

• consider whether they can perform a review on time and if they are not sure about it, or for other reasons (e.g. close family relations with one of the authors), to notify the Editors immediately about their decline to the request to review;
• complete a review in a timely manner and submit it promptly to the Editors;
• judge the quality of a paper in a truly objective manner; comments and conclusions should be based solely on the paper's scientific merit;
• make their comments to the manuscript in a clear and constructive manner.

Both Editors and Reviewers must keep to the principle of confidentiality: any manuscript submitted, or received for review must be treated as a confidential document. Information about the article must not be shared with anyone, except the author(s), reviewers, potential reviewers, and Editors. It is forbidden to use, or share information about, or discuss with anyone the contents of the publication without permission from the author(s).

Each article is checked for plagiarism. If plagiarism, or scientific inaccuracy is discovered in the submitted manuscript at any stage of editorial process, the Editors immediately deal with the issue and if it is justified, decide to exclude the manuscript from further processing.