Code of Ethics

Publishing Ethics

The editorial and publishing process of Safety & Defense is based on universal ethical principles and follows the conduct of Publishing Ethics, as laid out by the Committee on Publication Ethics.
The peer-review process follows the double-blind rule and is carried out in a fair, unbiased, and timely manner. Once a year, the Editorial Board publishes the list of reviewers on the journal’s webpage.

 

Authorship and Contributorship

In compliance with the policy of transparency and provision of information on agents who participate in research publication, the Editorial Board works against any form of academic misconduct, including ghostwriting (not revealing shared authorship) and guest authorship (designating as authors or co-authors people whose contribution in writing the manuscript was minimal or non-existent). All discovered cases of dishonesty will be disclosed.
The declared corresponding author is the person who handles the manuscript and correspondence during the publication process and is treated as the point of contact for any inquires, including the ones related to the authors’ ethical conduct and integrity of the work after the article is published.

 

Complaints and Appeals Procedure

Appealing the Publication Decision

The Editors of Safety & Defense have broad discretion in their decision on accepting or not the manuscript for editorial proceedings. If there are any concerns regarding the paper being either not fitting into the journal’s aims and scope or not good enough in quality, the Editor-in-Chief has a final saying whether the paper should enter the editorial process.

These decisions are not subject to appeal. The latter can be lodged if the authors are of the opinion that the rejection of the manuscript was a result of an error. In such a case, the authors should contact the Deputy Editor-in-Chief at p.bernat@sd-magazine.eu and provide a detailed written description of the alleged error.

Complaints Procedure

If authors have any complaints, they may contact the journal’s Deputy Editor-in-Chef, Paweł Bernat, Ph.D. at p.bernat@sd-magazine.eu and provide a detailed description of their concern.
Safety & Defense will acknowledge receipt of the complaint and investigate it in accordance with the relevant Committee on Publication Ethics’ guideline.

The Editorial Board will not tolerate any kind of abusive behavior or correspondence towards the journal’s staff and other people involved in the publishing process. The Board reserves the right to undertake appropriate actions to counteract the abuse, which may include withdrawing the manuscript from the editorial process.

 

Conflicts of Interest, Competing Interests, and Funding

We try to ensure that every party engaged in the publication process of Safety & Defense is free from any undue influence. Therefore, everyone participating in the process, including authors, editors, and reviewers, is obliged to declare any potential conflict of interest or the occurrence of competing interests that can, even potentially, interfere with the objectivity or integrity of the publication process.

By conflict of interest we understand a situation where the impartiality and objectivity of a publication decision, made either by an Editor or a reviewer, might be perceived as being compromised by a personal interest held or entrusted to a given individual. Relevant personal interest may be of financial or non-financial nature and it may concern a personal or family relationship or professional affiliations and other relevant outside activities.

Moreover, we expect that anyone who has a suspicion or has learned about an undisclosed conflict of interest concerning either an already published manuscript or a one still in the publication process will inform the Editorial Team about it, preferably the Deputy Editor-in-Chief (p.bernat@sd-magazine.eu).

Many manuscripts published at Safety & Defense are results of research financed by various, sometimes not academic sources. Due to transparency policy and the attempt to avoid authors’ competing interests, we require the inclusion of a funding declaration if the project was externally funded.

 

Ethical Oversight

The editorial procedure employed in our journal is designed and executed in accordance with the principles of transparency and best practices as defined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) in their newest commonly published document on the issue, namely Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

The whole editorial process from receiving the manuscript to its final publication is in every part transparent and described in detail and depicted in the graph form in the For Authors section.

Moreover, the Editorial Team pays special attention to all ethically-laden aspects occurring in the received manuscripts. One of the Team member is a trained ethicist with extensive experience in scholarly publishing. On that account, we are able to recognize potential ethical breaches and react appropriately. We follow strict ethical rules regarding consent to publication, publication on vulnerable populations, ethical conduct of research using animals, ethical conduct of research using human subjects, handling confidential data, and ethical business/marketing practices.

 

Intellectual Property and Plagiarism

Intellectual property rights are one of our key focuses. We strongly believe that intellectual activity has to be protected not only by legal regulations but also ethical standards. Therefore we closely check every sent manuscript for possible intellectual property rights breaches, including plagiarism.

Safety and Defense, in the manuscript processing, follows a general definition of plagiarism, according to which it is using someone else’s ideas, words, data, or other material produced by them without acknowledgement. We do not tolerate any form of plagiarism in our publications. Therefore, if there is a smallest possibility of its occurrence, the manuscript is checked by a plagiarism detection software (quetext). Manuscript containing plagiarism, in whole or part, will be automatically rejected. The authors, however, have the right to initiate the described above  appealing the publication decision procedure.

All discovered cases of duplicate submission, duplicate/overlapping publication, and autoplagiarism will result in an instant suspension of the publishing process and the authors will be asked to clarify the situation and amend the manuscript. By duplicate submission we understand sending the same manuscript, in the same or different languages, simultaneously to more than one journal. Duplicate or overlapping publication occurs when a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published and there is no clear, visible reference to the previous publication. The latter shares some features with autoplagiarism, which is defined as the act or process of plagiarizing one’s own work.

The above, of course, does not mean that the authors cannot build on and refer to their previous research and publications but, in order to show what is new in the submitted paper, they have to quote their works.

If an act of plagiarism is discovered post-publication, the Editorial Team will follow COPE’s Retraction Guidelines, and the paper will be retracted and remove from the journal’s webpage.

We ask our readers and reviewers to report any suspicions of plagiarism to safetyanddefense@sd-magazine.eu.

 

License and Copyrights

Safety & Defense is an open access journal that licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0 International License. The journal will maintain this licensing policy and allow authors to retain their publishing rights without restrictions.

It means that all published papers by Safety & Defense are free for everyone to read, download, copy, and distribute but the authors retain the copyright of their work. 

Safety & Defense does not charge any submission or manuscript-processing fees.

 

Peer Review Process

Safety & Defense is an open-source double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal. The whole editorial process is described and graphically preseneted in detailed in the For Authors section.

 

Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections

Safety & Defense allows post publication debate about the published papers. Authors, reviewers, and readers may participate in it by contacting, via emails, the Editorial Team.

We also have an implemented mechanism for correcting, revising or retracting articles after they have been published.

The authors of the published manuscripts have the right to correct or revise their work up to six month after publication but only if the Editor-in-Chief finds the proposed amendments necessary.

Safety & Defense reserves also the right to retract published papers if there is clear evidence (i) that the findings are unreliable due to either major error, fabrication, or falsification; (ii) plagiarism; (iii) duplicate submission, overlapping publication, or autoplagiarism; (iv) the manuscript contains material or data without authorization for use; (v) copyrights have been infringed; (vi) the paper reports unethical research; (vii) the paper has been published solely on the basis of a compromised or manipulated peer review process; (viii) the authors failed to disclose a major conflict of interest. In this regard, we closely follow COPE’s rules conveyed in the Retraction Guidelines.