Ethical standards
Compliance with standards provided by international organizations of publishing ethics and recommendations
The journal is in compliance with standards provided by international organizations on publishing ethics and recommendations regarding all aspects of publishing and all actors involved in the publication process, authors, journal editors and the publisher (for example http://www.icmje.org/). This concerns issues of publishing ethics, the publication itself, authorship, the author’s responsibilities, the peer review process, as well as the editor’s responsibilities.
The journal follows the standards and guidelines provided by COPE, especially regarding misconduct and fraud, and how to act in front of such a case. COPE provides a code of conduct with best practices in publishing and flowcharts that describe the publisher’s and editor’s actions, if such a case has to be resolved: http://publicationethics.org/. To authors with proven misconduct or fraud the actions available in the flowcharts will be applied.
Regarding Terahertz Science and Technology, detailed instructions are given in the instructions for authors. Here you will find the some main points describing the publication of an article in this journal:
1. Conditions for submission of an article
Submission of a manuscript implies that the work has not been published and is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept publication fees. For ethics in publishing consult COPE http://publicationethics.org/.
Authors are invited to comply with the “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals”, which were established and made available by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) at: http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/.
Plagiarism, Duplicate Submission/Publication Policy
Plagiarism is the unreferenced use of published and unpublished ideas.
The journal examines every submitted manuscript towards plagiarism or text recycling using. The Editors-in-Chief identify the use of already published content, which cannot be re-published in this journal for various reasons, such as copyright issues, auto plagiarism, plagiarism, etc. In case of doubt, and in order to avoid any forms of plagiarism or text recycling, authors are invited to visit relevant webpages of universities across the world dealing with this topic, or probably the websites of their own institutions.
Please visit these few examples:
Duplicate publication is publication of a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published, without clear, visible reference to the previous publication.
Should plagiarism or duplicate submission/publication be identified, the authors will be informed by the Editors-in-Chief. For a not yet published article, in case of conflicts, the relevant COPE guidelines are applied. The detailed and updated version of the way of action of the Editors-in-Chief is available on the website of COPE.
2. Authorship
Terahertz Science and Technology follows recommendations by ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) that all those designated as authors meet all of the criteria available at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/. Those contributors who do not meet all of the criteria shall be acknowledged.
3. Conflict of interest
Authors must disclose whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. They should also state that they have full control of all primary data and that they agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested.
Any conflict of interest, on personal or any other level must also be disclosed.
4. Peer Reviewing
The manuscripts will have all identifying information removed from them by the editorial office prior to the beginning of the review process. Then, all manuscripts submitted to the journal are submitted to two reviewers independent from the editorial committee of the journal. If an Editor-in-Chief, any other Editor or Editorial board member is (co)-author of a submitted article, the process is organized so that this person will not be involved with neither evaluation nor decision taking. The reviewers are informed of the necessity to keep the manuscript confidential before acceptance and publication, and their identity will not be disclosed to the authors. Based on the recommendations of the reviewers, the editorial board decides whether the manuscript is:
- Accepted without modifications
- Accepted, after modifications/revision (depending on a second peer reviewing)
- Rejected
Reviewers remain anonymous throughout the entire publication process. They should not contact authors (if any questions, they must contact the Editorial Office). Terahertz Science and Technology utilizes a double-blind review process.
The Editors-in chief have full authority for acceptation/rejection of the submitted manuscripts. Persons with a conflict of interest towards a submitted manuscript shall declare it and be withdrawn from the peer reviewing of this particular article.
5. Policies for publication of errata and for article retraction
Despite careful peer reviewing and article production, situations might occur where errata should be published or articles retracted. The Editors-in-chief, together with the publisher therefore follow the flowcharts established by COPE and published on their website (http://publicationethics.org/).
Data sharing policy
Authors may be invited to share with the peer reviewers during the article evaluation process in a confidential manner the data on which the research is based. Further, as long as the publication of data is not in opposition with patients’ privacy, authors are invited to upload supplemental datasets related to their research to an online repository. Doing so makes it available for both human and machine reading in order to further aid the acceleration of scientific discovery./p>
Authors are invited to prepare and deposit their data according to the FAIR data principles. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. The principles are available here. To summarize this, the dataset should be findable through a complete set of metadata, including a license for re-use and a data identifier (DOI or other). The dataset is accessible when access is open. Interoperable means that the data can be used and combined with other datasets in a format that is sufficiently widely distributed. Re-usability is achieved when the dataset is deposited with a corresponding Creative Commons open license and is downloadable. Furthermore, re-usability implies that parameters describing how this dataset has been collected needs to be disclosed. Machine and experimental conditions must be documented.