Ethics in Publishing
Annals of Forest Research adhere to and respect all the ethical principles regarding the scientific publishing. The received manuscript follow a clear protocol in order to identify the possible problems of ethics, similar to the existing international regulations.
The submitted manuscripts should be accompanied by a cover letter including clear refferals to the ethics rules, signed by author(s), who must confirm on own responsability that the paper do respect the ethical normatives.
Main deviations
The main deviations from ethics are the research fraud, plagiarism, improper authorship, submission of the same manuscript to more journals in the same time, conflict of interest.
The research fraud
Refers to data fabrication (presentation of some results never conducted, use of false data) or falsification (presentation of manipulated results of an experiment) and their presentation in a scientific paper.
Plagiarism
May have multiple forms, the most frequent are the use of an idea from published sources without mentioning the publication and the self-plagiarism, which uses parts from papers already published by author(s).
The improper contribution of the authors to manuscript
The quality of being author is a result of his/her contribution to the effective achievement of manuscript. Some journals require at submission and present very clearly (in the paper, on Website) the individual contribution of each author to different types of activities. To have the quality of author, a contributor to the paper must meet all the following demands1:
- "substantial contributions to conception and
- design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data and
- drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content and
- final approval of the version".
(From International Comitee of Medical Journal Editors: Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication)
The multiple/concomitant submission of the same manuscript to more publications
This is an unethical practice because predispose to self-plagiarism (double publication) and also is an abuse to the time allocated to authors/paper by editors and reviewers.
For detailed information we recommend:
Roig, M. 2011. Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing. Website or PDF version.
