Publishing ethics

Papers that have been published or submitted to other journals, conferences, or books will not be considered for publication in the Journal of Communications Software and Systems (JCOMSS). Revised and extended versions of papers printed in conference/symposium/workshop proceedings may be submitted to the journal with an appropriate cover note. Submission of an original manuscript to the Journal will be taken to mean that it represents original work not previously published, that it is not being considered elsewhere for publication; that the author is willing to assign copyright to the journal as per a contract that will be sent to the author just prior to publication and, if accepted for publication, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in any language, without the consent of the editor. Authors may make their papers available on their own web sites, with an acknowledgement of the journal board copyright. Authors must take full responsibility for all figures, etc. and present them as camera-ready copy.

Plagiarism

Authors must not use the words, figures, or ideas of others without attribution. All sources must be cited at the point they are used, and reuse of wording must be limited and be attributed or quoted in the text. If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they must cite the previous articles and indicate how their submitted manuscript differs from their previous work. If the similarity score of the manuscript is too high and if there are “copy paste“ blocks, authors are required to reduce “copy paste” actions. Such text blocks should be revised in a way that only the most important sentences/eqs/figs/tables for the journal paper can be reproduced, however by citing the source. Authors are requested to cite and discuss the relationship with all published articles.

NOTE: The similarity score of the manuscript is checked with the Crossref Similarity Check system to detect submissions that overlap with published and submitted manuscripts.

Authorship and Acknowledgements

It is supposed that all listed authors significantly contributed to the research in the manuscript and agreed to be an author. Changes in authorship must be declared to the journal and agreed with all authors. Anyone who contributed to the research or manuscript preparation, but is not an author, should be acknowledged by permission.

Conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest arise when non research issues noticeably affect the neutrality or objectivity of the work or its assessment.

Some general conflicts can be mentioned as follows:

Conflicts include the following:

funding including other payments or services received or expected by the authors relating to the subject of the work or from an organization with an interest in the outcome of the work
being employed by, on the advisory board for, or a member of an organization with an interest in the outcome of the work
patents or trademarks owned by someone or their organization
friends, family, relationships, and other close personal connections
competitors or someone whose work is critiqued.

Authors must consider all potential conflicts of interest. If there are none, the authors should in the copyright form check “The author(s) declare(s) that there are no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.” Corresponding author is responsible for co-authors declaring their interests.

Authors can declare potential conflicts of interest which will be considered by the editor and the reviewers.

Editors and reviewers should consider involving in the process in the following potential situations:

co-authoring publications or other works with any of the authors,
sharing an affiliation with any of the authors,
collaborating with any of the authoirs,
financial interest in the subject of the work,
feel unable to be objective.

Reviewers must declare any questionable interests in the response to “Article Review Request” letter., which will be considered by the editor.

Editors and reviewers must not ask authors in the review comments to include references merely to increase citations to their own or an associate’s work, to the journal, or to another journal they are associated with.

Organizers of the Special Issue: Conflicts of Interest

A member of the of Guest editor (GE) team can be (co)author of no more than 3 papers in total in the special issue.
The paper submitted by GE will be handled by the JCOMSS chief editor(s), directly or appointing an Area editor (AE) to handle the paper.
To ensure a high-quality special issue and to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, the GEs are reminded that all scientists including: a person in the same organization as any of the authors, a research collaborator of any of the authors, or any people closely related to any of the authors, should be excepted from the review process.

If a GE member is in any of the above categories, that GE member should not handle a paper and another GE member should be selected. If all the GEs fall into the above categories for a particular paper, the JCOMSS chief editor(s) should handle the review of the paper.