All team members:
•
must use
CrossCheck to screen for an unoriginal material before the peer-review process and at any point during the peer-review process;
• keep and promote ethical policies of the journal;
• ensure the confidentiality of the review process for both sides involved;
• do not disclose any information regarding a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding Author, Reviewers, potential Reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the Publisher, when appropriate;
• make a decision on publication or rejecting the paper according to the scientific importance/quality, interest to readers, Reviewers’ comments and the related legal requirements (i.e. plagiarism, breach of copyright, etc.);
• communicate politely with the authors about their paper;
• preserve anonymity of reviewers;
• remove an identification of the authorship before the manuscripts are submitted for a critical review process;
• reserve the right to make minor amendments to the text or return it back to the author for further revision;
• reserve the right to refuse the manuscript without the review process due to inappropriate quality of the manuscript, a different focus or violation of legal requirements (i.e. plagiarism, breach of copyright, etc.).
Reviewers' duties and responsibilities
Reviewers are obligated:
• to maintain the confidentiality of the review process;
• to have the objective judgement about any paper suggested for their review;
• to have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, authors, and/or research funders;
• to alert immediately the journal editor about any real or potential competing interest that could affect the independence of the review itself;
• not to use any part of the material obtained for blind review in their own publications or unpublished research studies without proper citing;
• to have no attempts to look for or contact the potential authors of the papers suggested for review.