Publication Ethics Policy: Natural Sciences Publishing (NSP) follows clear ethical standards for publication to ensure high quality scientific work and to enhance public trust in their findings. Thus, NSP applies this policy to all its owned journals in adherence to the Best Practice Guidelines outlined in the COPE Core Practices. This policy should be read [DMO1]  with our guidelines for authors and reviewers.

NSP goes through a robust process to detect and prevent misconduct practices. Well-known and specialized experts are selected to run this process, which at end leads to reliable and accurate manuscripts with informative findings and valuable applications. NSP is highly strict in handling violation of theses professional guidelines (see section 3). All submitted manuscripts must be original and not in a process of consideration elsewhere (for example in other journals or conference proceedings). 

1.  Editorial Standards and Processes 

Each NSP journal adopts well defined standards of authorship disclosed in the section of “For Authors”. Authors and co-authors are required to meet theses standard and confirm that all who met these standards are still listed under the list of authors.

1.1. Authorship: Published work must be attributed to one or more authors who are complied with authorship standards. A description of each author contribution should be summarized in a statement titled “Authors Contributions

1.2. Authorship Problems: To handle authorship problems; editors refer to COPE "Advice on how to spot authorship problems[3] ”

1.3. Fund and Support: Authors are requested to disclose any received fund or support from individual or organization in the “Acknowledgment” section. 

2. Peer-review Process

To ensure robust, objective, confidential, transparent and free of conflicts of interest peer-review process, NSP adopts the international policies of peer-review process (i.e. single-blind or double-blind, reviewers selection, conflict of interest, response time).

2.1. Reviewers Selection: Authors have to provide the list of the potential reviewers in their cover letter and the uploading system. NSP has the right to adopt the same list of provided reviewers or switch to another.  

2.2. Peer-review Conflict of Interest: Any conflict of interest should be reported directly to the editors as soon as receiving the invitation to review manuscripts. 

2.3. Confidentiality during Manuscript Handling: To ensure utmost confidentiality; NSP’s editors don’t share Manuscripts with any third party except the peer reviewers.

2.4. Manuscript Handling Time: Strictly rules are adopted by NSP’s editors to ensure timely process and update authors of any possible delays. 

3.   Publication Ethics: 

Research integrity is at the top of NSP’s priorities; so they make every effort to identify, detect and prevent any breach of the ethical code.

3.1. Misconduct: NSP’s editors make every effort to identify, detect and prevent any practices of data fabrication, authorship abuse, falsification, image manipulation, unethical research, plagiarism, biased reporting, duplicate publication, and undeclared conflicts of interest. 

3.2. Fabrication, Falsification and Image Manipulation: All NSP journals make every effort to identify, detect and prevent data fabrication, falsification and image manipulation by implementing advances image processing system. Except for some cases where it is necessary to manipulate image, and in this case adores have to explain where manipulation has been done.

3.3. Plagiarism: NSP’s editors make every effort to ensure that manuscripts are original material and prevent any practices of plagiarism and duplicate of publication. If such practices detected, authors are informed to handle them.

3.4. Duplicate Submission: To make sure that all manuscripts are not being published elsewhere, NSP’s journals make every effort to identify, detect and prevent concurrent or duplicate submission. If such practices detected, NSP applies strict actions and sanctions against these authors i.e papers are withdrawn from the website.

3.5. Sanctions: If any violations of the publication ethics or professional codes are detected, then strict action is taken, according to NSPs procedures for dealing with unethical behavior as follows:

A warning letter to the author covering the misconduct.

Immediate rejection of the submitted manuscript.

Probation period is applied to all responsible authors regarding any further submission to NSP journals.

Probation period is applied to all responsible authors regarding serving as referees/reviewers for NSP journals.

Publication of a formal notice detailing the misconduct.

A professional letter to the chairman of the authors or reviewers department or funding agency.

Formal retraction or withdrawal of a publication from the journal.

Reporting the case and outcome to a professional organization or higher authority for further investigation and action.

Further sanctions may be imposed, if violations of the above policies are found to be serious.

3.6. Editors and Board Members as Authors: NSP’s journals adopt well defined procedures and police to exclude editors from publication decisions when they are authors.

3.7. Conflicts of Interest: To ensure objectivity in the review procedure, editors and peer reviewers are requested to disclose that there is no any conflict of interest.

3.8. Libel and Defamation: NSP’s editors make every effort to identify, detect and prevent any certain language or expression either in the manuscripts or peer reviewer reports that would lead to legal action for defamation and negligent misstatement.

3.9. Editorial Independence and Commercial Issues: To ensure a formal relationship between the editors and the publisher (NSP), each NSP’s journal adopted polices and established mechanism to avoid biased decisions that financially influenced by authors.

3.10. Academic Debate: Comments or constructive criticism of any published work are allowed by all NSP’s journals. If such practice occurred, authors are informed to respond before the comments are published.

3.11. Appeals: To appeal against editorial decisions, authors refer to the international based mechanism that is adopted by NSP.

3.12. Corrections: NSP welcomes authors or readers to notify the journal editorial office if any errors discovered in the published work. If such occurred, editors and authors are notified to correct theses errors, then an erratum will be published in an issue in the same journal.

4.  Research Ethics in Journal Articles

4.1. Human Rights, Privacy and Confidentiality: Outcomes of clinical trials studies must be officially registered with public health authority in the country. Otherwise, authors are requested to a letter of explanation.

4.2. Cultures and Heritage: NSP’s editors make every effort to identify, detect and prevent publishing any images or texts that related to religious or historical events that could be offensive to some social groups.

4.3. Reporting Guidelines: NSP’s editors and peer reviewers make every effort to ensure that the necessary information is available in the submitted manuscripts for the purpose of evaluation by readers.

5.  Copyright and Access

5.1. Copyright and Licensing Information: Copyright and licensing are clearly described on the NSP journal’s web site (in the guidelines for authors). By submitting a manuscript for publication to the journal, authors acknowledge that the work is original and is not being submitted to another journal. The submission of a manuscript by the authors implies that the authors automatically agree to assign exclusive copyright to NSP if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication.

5.2. Archiving: NSP is a member of CrossRef which gives NSPs journals the ability to create and deposit digital object identifiers (DOIs) for the content we produce. We allocate DOIs to our publications by depositing bibliographic metadata for each article with CrossRef while citing metadata that includes the current location of the journal on the website.

5.3.  Author Self-Archiving Policy: Authors may upload their accepted manuscript PDF to institutional and/or centrally organized repositories, but must stipulate that public availability be delayed until 6 months after the first online publication in the journal have elapsed.

5.4. Ownership and management: NSP clearly provide information about the ownership and/or management of all its journals on the journal’s website. 

5.5. The website: NSP journals’ web sites have been created and maintained to ensure high ethical and professional standards are applied.

5.6. Publishing schedule: NSP clearly indicates in the first page of each journals website the publication frequency, i.e. the periodicity at which the issues of the journal are published. 

5.7. Name of the journal: NSP selects very carefully each journals name, which must be unique and reflective of the broad scope of the journal. A given journals name is selected to avoid confusion with other journal(s) while not misleading potential authors and readers about the journal’s origin or organization with other journals.