COPE

COPE standards

Lublin University of Technology Publishing House has implemented the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to be adhered to by authors, editors and reviewers. The following rules must be observed in relation to the publishing process which takes place on the Lublin University of Technology Publishing House e-Platform:

• Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing compiled by COPE,
• Best Practices of the Reviewing Procedures compiled by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education,
• Researcher’s Code of Ethics formulated by the Polish Academy of Sciences.

If a violation of the ethical rules is suspected, the Lublin University of Technology Publishing House and the journals’ editorial teams will follow the procedures described in the COPE guidelines (flowcharts).

I. The principles governing the functioning of the Publishing House and the editorial teams

1. The editorial teams are responsible for the proper course of the publishing process.
2. The editorial teams decide whether to accept the received manuscripts for publication or to reject them, taking care to follow the ethical standards and to maintain a high scientific level of published texts.
3. The editorial teams take care to maintain the integrity of the scientific record and editorial standards.
4. The Publishing House monitors whether the principles of publication ethics are followed by authors, reviewers and members of editorial teams.
5. The Publishing House and editorial teams supervise the reviewing process, taking care to ensure impartiality, meet deadlines and prevent conflicts of interests, and making sure that the submitted manuscripts are not used improperly or disclosed to third parties.
6. The Publishing House and editorial teams require that the author provides all consents necessary to publish the manuscript.
7. The Publishing House and editorial teams are impartial and treat authors equally, regardless of their gender, race, nationality, social origin etc.
8. The Publishing House and editorial teams attach particular importance to detecting all kinds of publication violations: especially plagiarism, duplicated publications, data fabrication, ghostwriting and guest-authorship. In such cases, the Publishing House proceeds according to a scheme of actions based on the COPE guidelines: contacts the author in order to explain the situation, gathers documentary evidence, informs relevant institutions concerned (in justified cases).
9. Editorial teams follow the COPE guidelines in case it is necessary to share the information about the received texts with Editorial Teams from outside the Publishing House when there are suspicions of misconducts by the participants of the publishing process, e.g. an author publishing the same text in a few publishing houses or journals.
10. In justified situations, the editorial team can withdraw the published material, e.g. when self-plagiarism is detected (the so-called text recycling), also after the issue has been printed, informing about it all the persons concerned.
11. If the author of the text is deceased, the editorial team, according to the COPE guidelines, contacts the person entitled to dispose of the copyright and determines if there is a need to publish a special note in the article indicating that the author is deceased.
12. In case a reader or a reviewer reports an undisclosed conflict of interests, the editorial team follows the COPE guidelines.
13. It is the duty of the Publishing House and the editorial teams to protect the personal data of the persons registered on the Platform (see more in the Regulations of the LUT Publishing House e-Platform).
14. The Publishing House and the editorial teams continue to improve their knowledge about malpractices in publishing practice to prevent any misconduct.

II. Principles for authors

1. The author of the materials submitted for publication should state that their texts are fully original and that no infringement of the copyright of third parties has been made.
2. The author makes every effort to ensure that the submitted texts meet the high scientific and editorial standards, according to the guidelines on the webpage.
3. The authors must follow the rules of transparency of peer review and, among others, not list the persons who did not take part in the creation of the paper as coauthors (ghostwriting and guest-authorship).
4. The author is not allowed to list other persons as coauthors of the paper without their knowledge, because it can cause a dispute concerning double submission by the authors or inability to contact an author to obtain the permission to publish, if it was not settled by the university in another way.
5. The list of the authors should not be changed before, during or after the publishing process (authorship dispute).
6. The author of a rejected article should not name or criticise the reviewer publicly, because the claims concerning the review should be directed to editorial teams with confidentiality of the data maintained.
7. It is the author’s obligation to inform the Publisher and the editorial team about a possible conflict of interests.

III. The principles governing the reviewing process

1. The reviewing process of the submitted texts is two-step and consists of an internal review (the editorial team decides whether to qualify the material for the further publishing process) and an external review (prepared by an appointed reviewer).
2. During the external reviewing process, each scientific text is assessed by two independent reviewers in accordance with double-blind peer review process or another kind of review procedure as indicated by the editorial office.
3. The reviewer should follow the COPE guidelines for the reviewers, according to which they should, among others: possess proper competences necessary to review submitted works; inform the editorial team about any possible conflict of interests; maintain the objectivity towards the works reviewed; send reviews on time.
4. The reviewer and the editorial team should follow the COPE guidelines in case of suspicion of data fabrication by the author or undisclosed conflict of interests.
5. In case of suspicion that the reviewer has appropriated the author’s ideas or data, the editorial team shall proceed according to the COPE guidelines, and specifically, to the following procedures: gathering documentary evidence, checking whether the allegations are well-founded, contacting the reviewer in order to explain the situation, checking the relationships between the author and the reviewer (or other persons asked to review a given manuscript), removing the reviewer from reviewer database and informing relevant interested institutions (in justified cases).
6. The decisions made during the reviewing process are kept confidential.

Detailed principles concerning publishing ethics described by the COPE are available in the COPE Flowcharts.