Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement


JAST  ethical policy is based on a codified process. Journal policies are a part of this process. Content compatibility of each submitted paper with the scope of journal is one of the journal policies. COPE's guidelines also check in this part. Submitted papers must be free of allegations such as libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. Reviewer comments are another part of decision process. The results of these two parts determine the final decision for each paper. JAST has been authorized to select valuable submitted papers for publication.

Journal of Aerospace Science and Technology (JAST) is following of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and complies with the highest ethical standards in accordance with ethical laws.

 Ethical policy and  Best Practices for Editors in JAST based on COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts  

Publisher responsibilities
  • publisher should ensure that editorial decisions on manuscript submissions are final and are only made based on professional judgment and will not be affected by any commercial interests.
  • publisher should monitor the ethics of Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers.
  • publisher is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.
Editorial responsibilities

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_1.pdf)

  • The editorial team should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
  • The editorial team should maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review or until they are published.
  • The editorial team should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
  • The editorial team should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
  • The editorial team should always monitor the issues of ethics in publishing, plagiarism and scientific violations and provide the necessary explanations if necessary.
  • The editorial team should not disclose the information and content of the articles to anyone other than the lead author, the reviewers and, if necessary, other editorial staff.
reviewers’ responsibilities  

Peer reviewers have an effective role in assistance the editor to make editorial decisions. They also can assist the authors to improve their papers throughout the editorial communications.

(https://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Peer%20review%20guidelines.pdf)

  • Each one of peer reviewers who feels unqualified to review a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process.
  • Confidentiality of article information must be observed in all areas. The article review process is to be done anonymously.
  • Reviewers should judge articles at the appropriate time and assist the editorial team in deciding whether or not to accept the article.
  • Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Referees should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
  • The referees' suggestions regarding the published articles should be submitted in the form of judging forms and in the comment section for the author and editor.
  • Reviewers should refrain from judging articles with conflict of interest and report any conflict of interest as soon as possible.
  • Reviewers' judgments about the quality and content of articles should be based on professional and objective opinions.

 


Authorship Criteria

(https://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/1999pdf13.pdf)

 To ensure authorship for the submitted manuscripts, the contributors should meet the following three conditions:

  • Conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data has been done by the author.
  • Either drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content has been done by the author.
  • The final approval of the version to be published has been given by the author. Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to be allowed to take public responsibility for suitable portions of the content.
 Authorship and Author’s Responsibility
  • Submitted papers must be approved by its author(s) to consider for refereeing in JAST. Author(s) must thus have an active presence to design and prepare all materials of their papers. ALL of the authors must have critically reviewed its content and have approved the final version submitted for publication.
  • Submitted papers must be approved by its author(s) to consider for refereeing in JAST. Author(s) must thus have an active presence to design and prepare all materials of their papers. ALL of the authors must have critically reviewed its content and have approved the final version submitted for publication.
  • After an article has been accepted for publication in the JAST, no additional authors or changes to the first or corresponding authors are allowed. If an author wishes to be removed from the byline, he or she must submit a letter signed by the author and all other authors indicating their wish to be removed from the list of authors. Any change in the authors' order in the byline requires a letter signed by all authors indicating their agreement.
  • Authors are responsible for the accuracy of the manuscript content. They should also sign an agreement form confirming their contribution in writing the manuscript. Papers are only considered for publication once consent is given by all contributing authors
  • It is necessary to observe the basic principles of writing and research in writing articles, and articles should be written and arranged according to the format of the journal.
  • Before submitting an article, all authors should read the authors' guide and the terms and conditions of submitting an article in this journal.
  • The corresponding author must confirm and submit the consent and knowledge of other co-authors of the article in this publication through the authors' commitment form.
  • All authors whose names are mentioned in the article and in the letter of commitment form must participate in writing and compiling the article.
  • Appreciation and organizational affiliation of authors should be mentioned in the article and any conflicts of interest between authors or organizations should be mentioned.
  • Authors should clearly report the sponsor of the research (if any).
  • Authors have a duty to notify the editor as soon as possible if they find a mistake or incorrection in their published article to correct or revoke the article.

 

 Human and animal studies

All manuscripts reporting the results of experimental investigations involving human subjects should include a statement confirming the informed consent was obtained from each subject or subject’s guardian. All animal or human studies should be used after approval of the experimental protocol by a local ethics committee.


Possible Misconducts

  • Data Fabrication and Falsification

Data fabrication and falsification means the researcher did not really carry out the study, but made-up data or results and had recorded or reported the fabricated information. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but manipulated, changed, or omitted data or results from the research findings.

  • Duplicate Publication

Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions. 

  • Citation Manipulation

Excessive citations in a submitted manuscript that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and were included solely to increase citations to a given author's work or articles published in a particular journal are referred to as citation manipulation. This is a form of scientific misconduct since it misrepresents the importance of the specific work and publication in which it appears.

  • Simultaneous Submission:

Simultaneous submission occurs when a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal when it is already under consideration by another journal.

  • Redundant Publications:

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.

  • Improper Author Contribution or Attribution: 

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

  • Plagiarism

Plagiarism is intentionally using someone else’s ideas or other original material as if they are one's own. Copying even one sentence from someone else’s manuscript, or even one of your own that has previously been published, without proper citation is considered by JAST Journal as plagiarism. All manuscripts under review or published with JAST are subject to screening using plagiarism prevention software (iThenticate ). Thus, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. The authors are expected to check their manuscript for plagiarism before submission.

If plagiarism is detected during peer review, the submission can be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication we reserve the right, as necessary, to issue a correction or retract the article. We reserve the right to notify the institutions of authors about the plagiarism that was found before or after publication.

 


The Principles of Transparency

  • Study design and ethical approval

Good research should be well justified, well planned, appropriately designed, and ethically approved. To conduct research to a lower standard may constitute misconduct. The authors are responsible for the whole scientific content as well as the accuracy of the bibliographic information (https://creativecommons.org/choose/).

 

  • Data analysis

Data should be appropriately analyzed, but inappropriate analysis does not necessarily amount to misconduct. Fabrication and falsification of data do constitute misconduct.

 

  • Conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest comprise those which may not be fully apparent and which may influence the judgment of author, reviewers, and editors. They have been described as those which, when revealed later, would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived. They may be personal, commercial, political, academic or financial. “Financial” interests may include employment, research funding, stock or share ownership, payment for lectures or travel, consultancies and company support for staff.

 

  • Peer-review

This journal uses Double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. Authors have the right to communicate to the editor if they do not wish their manuscript to be reviewed by a particular reviewer because of potential conflicts of interest. No article is rejected unless negative comments are received from at least two reviewers. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site (Peer review process journal page link).

 

  • Archiving
    • The plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to journal's content (https://jast.ias.ir/?lang=en) is clearly indicated. This policy sets out the ways in which the authors of JAST can archive copies of their work on their own web pages, corporate web pages, and various other subject repositories. 
    • JAST is an open access license, articles can be made available immediately according to the terms of their specific Creative Common license. If an author has published an article under an Open Access license, JAST would encourage author to share the Version of Record on publication as opposed to the Accepted Manuscript.
    • Authors may also reuse the Abstract and Citation information (e.g. Title, Author name, Publication dates) of their article anywhere at any time including social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs and Twitter, providing that where possible a link is included back to the article on the JAST site. Preferably the link should be, or include, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which can be found in the Citation information about the article online. The accepted version may be placed on: the author's personal website and/or the author's company/institutional repository or archive. Self-archiving of the submitted version is not subject to an embargo period.
    • JAST is now formally archived at the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI).
  • Publishing schedule

JAST is published 2 issues per year. All the content from the beginning to the end will be available for ever on JAST exclusive website (https://jast.ias.ir/?lang=en). 

 

  • Privacy and Confidentiality

JAST has commitment to protect all information of submitted articles from untrusted ones. In this regard, JAST’s editorial boards such as reviewers and advisers are only able to access the information.

Editors must clarify to reviewers that manuscripts sent for review are privileged communications and the authors' private property. As a result, reviewers and editorial staff must respect the authors' rights by refraining from publicly discussing or appropriating the authors' work before the manuscript is published. Reviewers should not be allowed to make copies of the manuscript for their files, and they should not be allowed to share it with others except if the editor permits them. After submitting reviews, reviewers should return or destroy copies of the manuscripts. Editors should not keep copies of manuscripts that have been rejected. Without the permission of the reviewer, author, and editor, reviewer comments should not be published or otherwise made public.

 

  • Ownership and management

Iranian Aerospace Society

 

  • Governing Body

Aerospace Science and Technology has very strong editorial board, whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the journal’s editors is provided on the journal’s Web site (https://jast.ias.ir/journal/editorial.board).

 

  • Editorial team/Contact information

Aerospace Science and Technology is provided the contact information for the editorial office of journal (https://jast.ias.ir/journal/editorial.board).

 

  • Copyright and Licensing

This journal provides immediate open access to its content. All articles published in JAST are fully open access; immediately freely available to read, download and share. All journal papers are released under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaption, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as the original author(s) and source are properly credited. Under open access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly.

  • copyright holder

The authors are the copyright holder in this journal. 

  • Advertising

The policy of the journal is not to have advertising.

  • Corrections and retractions

To maintain the integrity of academic record, journal may have to publish correction or retraction of paper published in journal. According to agreed academic community norms, corrections or corrections of published articles are made by publishing an Erratum or Retraction article, without altering the original article in any other way than by adding a prominent connection to the Erratum / Retraction article. The original article remains in the public domain and should be commonly indexed to the subsequent Erratum or Retraction. We may have to delete the material from our website and archive sites in the exceptional event the material is considered to infringe those rights or is defamatory. It may be necessary for the original author(s) to make minor corrections to published articles by making a comment on the published Article. It will only be acceptable if the modifications do not affect the article's results or conclusions.

  • Corrections

Changes to published articles that affect the article's meaning and conclusion but do not invalidate the article in its entirety may be corrected, at the discretion of the editor(s), by publishing an Erratum indexed and linked to the original article. Changes in authorship of published articles are corrected through an Erratum.

  •  Retractions

If the scientific information in an article is significantly compromised on rare occasions it may be appropriate to retract published articles. In these cases, Journal must comply with the COPE guidelines. Retracted papers are indexed and the original article is referred to.


Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct

Publisher and editor of the journal take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others. In this journal the editor does not encourages or knowingly allows such improper behavior. In the event that the journal’s publisher or editor is made aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article in the journal –the publisher or editor shall follow COPE’s guidelines (or equivalent) in dealing with allegations. 

However, Editor-in-Chief takes reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others.

  • The first action of the journal Editor is to inform the Editorial Office of JAST by supplying copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner.
  • If the author’s explanation is unacceptable and it seems that serious unethical conduct has taken place, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee via Editorial Office.  After deliberation, the Committee will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions. 
  • If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the Publication Committee, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the author of JAST publication policies; if the manuscript has been published, the Editor may request the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.
  • Notification will be sent to corresponding author and any work by the author responsible for the violation or any work these persons coauthored that is under review by JAST journal will be rejected immediately.
  • The authors are prohibited from serving on JAST editorial board and serving as a reviewer for JAST Journal. JAST reserves the right to take more actions.
  • In serious cases of fraud that result in retraction of the article, a retraction notice will be published in the journal and will be linked to the article in the online version. The online version will also be marked “retracted” with the retraction date.

Appeals and Complaints Proccess 

We support legitimate editor judgment challenges. But, you must provide strong backing or new data/information to answer the editor's and reviewers' concerns. Editors rarely reverse their initial decisions and don't count on many appeals. Hence, if your paper is rejected, you are strongly advised to submit to another journal. Because they are based on the unbiased views of the reviewers, the Editorial Board's final decisions are often irrevocable and cannot be modified. But, if you disagree with the publication's decision and think you have a valid reason to appeal, follow these steps:

  • Describe your valid concerns and the reasons you disagree with the decision.
  • Any additional material or data that you would like considered throughout the review process should be provided to the publication's editors.
  • If you think the reviewers misjudged your paper, state why and provide the necessary supporting evidence.
  • If you think there was an interest conflict throughout the arbitration process, provide evidence.
  • The editors only take into account one appeal for each article. After receiving the appeal, the editors may speak with the referees and editors who read the piece.
  • Decisions made by the editors and editorial board on appeals are final, and they may involve rejecting the article, seeking additional peer review, or requiring submission of a revised version of the manuscript.