Ethical Guidelines for Authors

Ensuring transparency, integrity, and highest scientific standards at JACOTECH

Academic Publishing Ethics

Manuscript Content

All authors must declare that they have read and agreed to the content of the submitted manuscript.

Publication Ethics

Manuscripts may be rejected by the Editorial Board if it is felt that the work was not carried out within a sound ethical framework.

Competing Interests

Authors must declare all potential competing interests involving people or organisations that might reasonably be perceived as relevant to their work.

Plagiarism Policy

Plagiarism in any form constitutes a serious violation of the most basic principles of scholarship and cannot be tolerated. Examples of plagiarism include:

1. Direct Copying Word-for-word copying of portions of another's writing without enclosing the copied passage in quotation marks and acknowledging the source in the appropriate scholarly convention.

2. Unique Terms The use of a particularly unique term or concept that one has come across in reading without acknowledging the author or source.

3. Paraphrasing The paraphrasing or abbreviated restatement of someone else's ideas without acknowledging that another person's text has been the basis for the paraphrasing.

4. False Citation Material should not be attributed to a source from which it has not been obtained.

5. Fabricated Data Data that has been fabricated or altered in a laboratory or experiment; although not literally plagiarism, this is clearly a form of academic fraud.

6. Multiple Submissions Unacknowledged multiple submission of an article for several purposes without prior approval from the parties involved.

7. Unacknowledged Collaboration Unacknowledged multiple authors or collaboration: the contributions of each author or collaborator should be made clear.

8. Self-Plagiarism Self-plagiarism/double submission: the submission of the same or a very similar article to two or more publications at the same time.

Appendix: Competing Interests Examples

Examples of competing interests include but are not limited to financial, professional and personal interests such as:

Research grants (from any source, restricted or unrestricted).
Relationships (paid or unpaid) with organisations and funding bodies including nongovernmental organisations, research institutions or charities.
Membership of lobbying or advocacy organisations.
Personal relationships (i.e. friend, spouse, family member, current or previous mentor, adversary) with individuals involved in the submission or evaluation of an article, such as authors, reviewers, editors, or members of the Editorial Board of a JACOTECH journal.
Personal convictions (political, religious, ideological, or other) related to an article's topic that may interfere with an unbiased publication process (at the stage of authorship, peer review, editorial decision making or publication).