Editorial Ethics

Main provisions

Reviewers and editors are required to conduct an impartial review of manuscripts, maintain confidentiality, and declare any conflicts of interest in advance.
The editorial team carefully reviews all controversial situations and violations, and if necessary, makes corrections or removes materials.

The editorial board, authors, and reviewers must adhere to the following principles:

honesty and objectivity in presenting research results;
transparency of the review process;
responsibility for the accuracy of the data provided;
compliance with copyright regulations;
avoiding conflict of interest;
adherence to academic integrity standards.

If the research involved human subjects (research participants, respondents, etc.), their biological materials, or personal or confidential data, the authors must obtain prior approval from the relevant ethics committee (bioethics committee, institutional ethics committee, etc.). Research using laboratory or other animals must be conducted in accordance with ethical standards for the humane treatment of animals and have the appropriate approval from the competent ethics committee. The name of the institution that provided the ethical opinion, as well as the number and date of the relevant decision, must be indicated in the article.

The editorial board reserves the right to request from authors supporting documents regarding obtaining ethical permission. In the absence of such permission or non-compliance with ethical requirements, the editorial board may refuse to consider or publish the manuscript.

General duties and responsibilities of the editorial team

The editorial board of the journal relies on the developments of the Committee on Publication Ethics ( UK), Elsevier publishing house (Netherlands), and other foreign editorial associations and information systems in its work .
During the editorial and publishing process, it provides technical and informational support to journal users.
Guarantees the confidentiality of materials submitted to the journal throughout the entire editorial and publishing process, taking into account the provisions of the Law of Ukraine "On Personal Data Protection" and the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR.
Takes into account comments and suggestions from readers, authors, and reviewers on ways to improve the publication.
The editorial team promptly responds to any complaints regarding the magazine's work and guarantees the resolution of all problematic situations.

Collaboration with readers

The editorial team ensures that readers are properly informed and distribute newly published content.
Guarantees that all published scientific materials have been peer-reviewed by qualified experts.

Collaboration with authors

The editorial office provides authors with detailed instructions on the editorial and publishing process, informs about the deadlines for accepting materials and the publication dates of issues.
Authors are provided with a detailed description of the review process; in case of any deviations from the described process, editors are required to provide the author with an explanation.
The editorial board determines the criteria for evaluating materials and selects reviewers for each individual manuscript.
Sends detailed comments from reviewers to authors.
The editorial office reserves the right to make minor literary edits and corrections of texts while preserving the author's style.
The editor's decision to accept/reject a manuscript is based on its relevance, novelty, compliance with the scientific direction and requirements of the journal.
If the manuscript contains many controversial points (for example, negative feedback on the quality of the article from both reviewers, the article has not been finalized by the author taking into account the reviewers' comments), the editorial board may not approve it for publication.
In the event of an author's disagreement with an editorial decision, the journal declares a mechanism for appealing to the editorial board.
At the author's request, the manuscript may be withdrawn from consideration and archived in the journal system (with the subsequent possibility of reinstating the submission in the queue). To do this, the author must contact the editor with a corresponding request.

Collaboration with reviewers

The editorial board provides reviewers with detailed instructions on how to work in the journal system.
The editorial board asks the reviewer to indicate the presence of possible competing interests before agreeing to review the material intended for review.
The editorial board asks reviewers to report all cases of plagiarism.
Sends reviewers a message thanking them for their contributions to the journal
Ensures that the qualifications of all reviewers correspond to the level of the professional publication, and adjusts their composition as necessary.
Terminates cooperation with reviewers who provide poor quality reviews or are consistently late.
Uses a range of sources (not just personal contacts) to identify potential reviewers (specialized industry databases).
Ensures that the review process is fair, objective, unbiased, and timely.
Adapts the review process to the needs of users and allows each reviewer to review the submission in the most convenient way for them.
Confidentiality. Reviewers are not authorized to disclose data presented in manuscripts prior to their publication.

Collaboration with editors

The editorial board undertakes:

Provide new editors with detailed instructions on working with the journal's electronic editing system and the specifics of the editorial and publishing process.
Regularly reviews the composition of the editorial staff.
Constantly informs members of the editorial board about innovations.
Provides clear instructions to editors regarding their functions, powers, and responsibilities (support and promotion of the journal).
Periodically holds consultations with members of the editorial board, informs about changes in the journal's policy, technical innovations, and exchanges proposals for the further functioning of the journal.
Confidentiality. Editors are not authorized to disclose data presented in manuscripts prior to their publication.

Author status

The list of authors should include individuals who have made significant contributions to the scientific research presented in the article. Academic status, position, or other measure of seniority should not determine the order in this list; the order of authors should indicate the relative leadership and magnitude of the researchers' contribution to the scientific work.

The author of the manuscript is considered to be the researcher who participated in all of the following stages of article preparation:

formulating the idea of conducting the research and stating the problem and objectives of the research;
development of the concept and design of the manuscript, data collection, analysis and interpretation;
writing an article or its critical scientific review and correction;
approval of the final version before publication.

Each author is personally responsible for the content of the article. If the work is carried out by a large group of scientists, the list of authors should include individuals who meet the above criteria and add the name of the group.

Funding of research or general supervision of the group's work does not constitute authorship.

Change of authors. If, for any reason, changes need to be made to the list of authors between the time of submission of the manuscript and the time of its publication, the author depositing the manuscript must contact the editorial office and indicate the reason for the changes.

Use of Artificial Intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, do not qualify for authorship status. After all, the author must be responsible for the article, and this cannot be adequately applied to LLMs. The use of LLMs in the study should be properly documented in the “Methods” or “Acknowledgements” section of the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

Conflicts of interest (CI) are factors that negatively affect objectivity or may be perceived as interfering with the process of reviewing, making editorial decisions, publishing, and presenting a manuscript.

Conflicts of interest may arise in relation to individuals or organizations, and fall into the following categories (but are not limited to):

Personal CI:

Personal relationships (e.g., friends, family members, current or previous supervisors, opponents) with individuals involved in submitting or reviewing manuscripts (authors, reviewers, editors, or editorial board members);
Personal beliefs (political, religious, ideological or other) related to the topic of the manuscript that may interfere with the objective publication process (at the stage of submission, review, editorial decision-making or publication).

Professional CI:

A reviewer or editor is a colleague of the author who participated in or observed the conduct of the study.
Membership in organizations that lobby the author's interests.

Financial CI:

Research grants from any sponsoring organizations: governmental, non-governmental, scientific research or charitable institutions;
Fees, gifts and rewards of any kind.

All persons involved in the manuscript, including authors, editors, reviewers, and readers who comment on and evaluate the material, must declare any conflict of interest:

If, in the opinion of the editors, there are circumstances that may affect an unbiased review, the editorial board does not engage such a reviewer.

The editorial board reserves the right not to publish a manuscript if the conflict of interest declared by the author jeopardizes the objectivity and reliability of the research evaluation.

If the editorial board discovers a conflict of interest that was not declared upon submission, the manuscript may be rejected. If an undeclared conflict of interest is discovered after publication, the article may be corrected or deleted, if necessary.

Access and use of materials and data

The authors agree that all materials presented in the publication are freely available and may be used by other researchers for scientific non-commercial purposes under the terms of the Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) .

Supporting data (datasets, software applications, photo, audio, video materials) that highlight and complement the content of the study may be additionally placed in institutional repositories or on other Internet resources, which must be referenced in the article. If the author does not have access to such a resource, the materials can be uploaded to the journal as "Supporting files" during article submission (Step 4).

If there is any doubt about the reliability of the data provided in a published article, and access to it is closed, which makes it impossible to verify it, readers can contact the editorial office to further contact the author, check and make corrections.

At the request of the editorial board, authors must provide open access to all data and materials presented in the article, unless this violates the confidentiality rules associated with anonymous surveying of people during research.

Corrections and additions

If necessary, the editorial team makes the necessary corrections and clarifications to the content, publishes refutations and apologies.
The editorial team may make minor edits and clarifications to the content of the article that improve its content but do not significantly change its overall structure. To do this, you must send a request to the editorial team.

Manuscript submitted to several publications

At the time of submission, authors must confirm that the uploaded manuscript (or a similar one) is not currently being submitted for consideration and publication in another journal. If a similar work has already been submitted or published in another journal, the editorial board will not consider such manuscripts.

Intellectual property

The editorial team responds to signals related to intellectual property issues and works to prevent potential violations of current Ukrainian legislation on intellectual property and copyright.
The editorial board monitors that the results of scientific research published in the journal are carried out in accordance with international recommendations.

Plagiarism

The authors are responsible for the reliability of the information in the articles, the accuracy of names, surnames, and quotations.
In cases of plagiarism detection, the authors of the submitted materials are responsible.

Editorial Ethics

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