Ethics & Disclosures

Publishing Ethics
SS journals were committed to ensuring ethics in publication and quality of articles. Conformance to standards of ethical behavior is therefore expected of all parties involved: Authors, Editors, Reviewers, and the Publisher. In particular, SS Journals are peer-reviewed journals in various disciplines. This statement is explained the ethical behavior of all parties involved in the act of publishing an article for its journals. This statement is based on internationally accepted Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. SS journals are the product of the joint efforts of the authors, journal editors and the peer reviewers. Therefore, it is of great importance to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior. The ethics standard used by International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (IJSSH) is based on the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).  

Publication Malpractice Statement
Editorial Responsibilities

• Editor is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to IJSSH will be published.
• Editor is guided by the policies of the Journal's Editorial Board, taking into account the quality of papers, their originality, relevance, and readability, and their accord with the aims and scopes of the journal.
• Editor is obliged to provide clear and transparent guidelines for Authors in preparing manuscripts for publishing. Instructions for Authors are available at the journal's website. Instructions for Authors are published in the first Issue of every Volume.
• Editor is obliged to provide clear and transparent guidelines for Peer Reviewers, to provide confidentiality of peer review and to protect Peer Reviewers' identity. Instructions for Reviewers are available at the journal's website. Instructions for Reviewers and List of Peer Reviewers for every year are published in the last Issue of every Volume.
• Editor and Editorial Board take into account legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and
• Editor is due to react if there is any justified suspicion about ethical misconduct in both published and unpublished papers.
• Editor must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles considered for publication. If Editor feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the paper shall be made by the Editorial Board. Since the identity of the authors and reviewers is unknown to each other, the Editor is obliged to guarantee their anonymity.

Authors’ Responsibilities

• Author/s warrants that his/her/their manuscript is an original work that has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere either in printed or electronic form.
• Authors warrant that all who have contributed significantly to the manuscript are indicated as authors.
• Authors warrant that the rights of third parties will not be violated and that the publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.
• Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions, the validity of the results and must make sure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the data public.
• Authors wishing to include figures, charts or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s) and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.
• It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that papers submitted to IJSSH are written with ethical standards in mind and that they do not contain plagiarism. Authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of others.
• When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her/their own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal Editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.

Procedures for Dealing with Unethical Behaviour
Anyone may inform the editors and/or Editorial Staff at any time of suspected unethical behavior or any type of misconduct by giving the necessary information/evidence to start an investigation.

Investigation
Editor-in-Chief will consult with the Section Editors on decisions regarding the initiation of an investigation. During an investigation, any evidence should be treated as strictly confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in investigating. The accused will always be given the chance to respond to any charges made against them. If it is judged at the end of the investigation that misconduct has occurred, then it will be classified as either minor or serious.

Minor misconduct
Minor misconduct will be dealt directly with those involved without involving any other parties, e.g.:  

• Communicating with authors/reviewers whenever a minor issue involving misunderstanding or misapplication of academic standards has occurred.
• A warning letter to an author or reviewer regarding fairly minor misconduct.

Major misconduct
Editor-in-Chief, in consultation with the Section Editors, and, when appropriate, further consultation with a small group of experts should make any decision regarding the course of action to be taken using the evidence available. The possible outcomes are as follows (these can be used separately or jointly):

• Publication of a formal announcement or editorial describing the misconduct.
• Informing the author's (or reviewer's) head of department or employer of any misconduct by means of a formal letter.
• The formally announced retraction of publications from the journal in accordance with the Retraction Policy.
• A ban on submissions from an individual for a defined period.
• Referring a case to a professional organization or legal authority for further investigation and action.

When dealing with unethical behaviour, the Editorial Staff will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Disclaimer
The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the Editors and Editorial Staff. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in the articles. Publisher shall have no liability in the event of the issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Peer Review Process
Review Policy
IJSSH is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal. All submitted manuscripts are initially pre-reviewed by the Editorial Board, who reserves the right to accept or reject the manuscript. 

If the Editorial Board concludes that the manuscript is within the scope of the journal and meets the standards and requirements for publication, the Editor proceeds to send the manuscript to two peer reviewers recommended by the Editorial Board. Reviewers are chosen based on their eminence and competence in the research area to which the submitted manuscripts are related.

Reviewers are selected from the highest university teaching and research titles. The choice of reviewers is at the discretion of the Editor and the Editorial Board. The Journal list of reviewers is updated and expanded with new reviewers annually.

Reviewers must not have a conflict of interest with respect to the authors. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.  The reviewer that feels unqualified to review the research reported in the particular manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editor.

Reviewers are obliged to send the review to the Editorial Board within three weeks upon receipt of the manuscript. Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is deemed inappropriate. Reviewers are expected to express their views clearly, with supporting arguments. If there is any justified suspicion about plagiarism or ethical misconduct in the manuscript, the peer reviewer is obliged to inform the Editor about it.

Reviewers should alert the Editor to any well-founded suspicions or the knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and alert the Editor to substantial similarities between a reviewed manuscript and any manuscript published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, in the event, they are aware of such. Reviewers should also alert the Editor to a parallel submission of the same manuscript to another journal, in the event they are aware of such.

Manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviews are conducted in a standardized way by using the Peer Review Form, which is, along with Instructions for Reviewers, sent by the Editor to reviewers without revealing the author’s identity. 

Reviewer must fill in data related to the manuscript (title, the area of research, the subject of analysis, adequacy of methodology and interpretation, quality of literature used).

In the Reviewer’s Conclusions section, the peer reviewer needs to check the category of the paper appropriate for the reviewed manuscript (original scientific article or review article), and proceed to check one of the three following options: 

• Paper to be published as it is;
• Paper to be published with mandatory changes with a relevant explanation;
• Paper should not be published with appropriate explanation. 

In the next section, the peer reviewer is requested to fill in his/her name, surname, title, the full name of the institution where he/she is employed and the place and date of the peer-review. These data are confidential and stay with the Editorial Board, and are not sent to the author of the reviewed manuscript. During the review process, reviewers act independently, and without insight into each other’s identities. In cases where the manuscript receives diverging reviews (a positive and a negative one), the Editor will assign an additional reviewer.

Authors that receive conditionally positive reviews are required to take into account the comments made by the reviewers, or if they do not wish to do so, they can withdraw their submissions and report their decision immediately to the Editor. Authors are required to send the amended manuscripts to the Journal within 15 days after they received the reviews. The final evaluation of the manuscripts related to the fulfillment of reviewers’ requests is made by the Editor and the Editorial Board. 

Publication Frequency
The SS Journals is issued three times a year.

For Authors
The Procedure for Submitting an Article

Authors who want to submit their article for publishing in our journal Issues in IJSSH need to be well informed about the Authors' Guidelines, which you can find here.

Authors need to register an account on our web page in order to publish their works, in a process which consists of five easy steps.

The Editorial Board of IJSSH will notify the author afterward about any potential changes, and if the work is accepted for publishing within the decisions made during the peer review process of the article.  

Authorship
Authors must make sure that all only contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors. If persons other than authors were involved in important aspects of the research project and the preparation of the manuscript, their contribution should be acknowledged in a footnote or the Acknowledgments section. 

Acknowledgement of Sources
Authors are required to properly cite sources that have significantly influenced their research and their manuscript. Information received in a private conversation or correspondence with third parties, in reviewing project applications, manuscripts, and similar materials must not be used without the express written consent of the information source. 

Plagiarism
Plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other forms of creative expression as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action. Plagiarism may constitute the following:

• Word-for-word, or almost word-for-word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, by using quotation marks);
• Copying figures or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism. Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected.

If an attempt at plagiarism is found in a paper after having been published in IJSSH, the author will be required to publish a written apology to the authors of the original paper, and further collaboration with the author of plagiarized papers will be terminated.

Plagiarism is a serious issue around the world in the arena of manuscript writing. Plagiarism is the act of taking another person's writing, work, data or even idea intentionally or unintentionally and passing it off as your own. It also includes using other's ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information. It is also plagiarism to provide someone else's paper as your own or cut and paste text from the Internet to your paper without citing the source.

We expect that the articles submitted to us must adhere to the ethical standards and they should not overlap with other articles published or articles in press. Articles containing plagiarism seriously affect our goal of achieving high standards of quality, uniqueness and innovation. We do respect others’ work and expect the same from our authors.

We are members of Turnitin and Crossreff for using the latest software to detect plagiarism. If potential plagiarism is detected, we will take serious actions against those papers containing plagiarism which may include removing those articles completely from our website and from the websites of the databases in which we are listed and indexed. The editors will contact the authors for clarification, and may also contact the authors’ institution. Original authors can file a complaint against the authors of plagiarized papers. Therefore we request that all our author(s) please adopt the holistic & pragmatic approach to design the manuscript of interest. Hence IJSSH will not be responsible for further action on plagiarism issues. The author will be solely responsible for plagiarism issues. IJSSH will only proceed with an article for publication if the plagiarism result is below 10%.

Plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other forms of creative expression as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action. Plagiarism may constitute the following:

• Word-for-word, or almost word-for-word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, by using quotation marks);
• Copying figures or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism. Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected.

If an attempt at plagiarism is found in a paper after having been published in IJSSH, the author will be required to publish a written apology to the authors of the original paper, and further collaboration with the author of plagiarized papers will be terminated.

Retraction Policy
Manuscripts published in the Journal shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as long as it is possible. However, occasionally, circumstances may arise where a published manuscript will later have been retracted. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistakes overseen in the period prior to publishing with the aim of preserving the integrity of science and not for the purpose of punishing the author. 

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication. 

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has also been adopted by IJSSH.  In the electronic version of the original article, an HTML link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged; save for a watermark in the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

Self-archiving Policy
IJSSH allows authors to deposit Author's final, i.e. Publisher's version/PDF in an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, or to publish it on Author's personal website and departmental website including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc., at any time after publication, and in accordance with Terms of Use of license Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Publisher copyright and source must be acknowledged and a link must be made to the article's DOI.

Authorship Rights
All articles in IJSSH are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which allows authors and users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the article. The CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license permits non-commercial and commercial re-use of an open-access article, as long as the author is properly attributed. Copyright on any research article published by IJSSH is retained by the author(s). 

Authors grant to the IJSSH right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media. Copyright and source must be acknowledged and a link must be made to the article's DOI. 

Authors grant to the Publisher the following rights to the manuscript, including any supplemental material, and any parts, extracts or elements thereof:

• the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript in printed form, including print-on-demand;
• the right to translate the Manuscript into other languages;
• the right to reproduce the Manuscript using photomechanical or similar means including, but not limited to photocopy, and the right to distribute these reproductions;
• the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript electronically or optically on any and all data carriers or storage media – especially in machine-readable/digitalized form on data carriers such as hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray Disc (BD), Mini-Disk, data tape – and the right to reproduce and distribute the Article via these data carriers;
• the right to store the Manuscript in databases, including online databases, and the right of transmission of the Manuscript in all technical systems and modes;
• the right to make the Manuscript available to the public or to closed user groups on individual demand, for use on monitors or other readers (including e-books), and in printable form for the user, either via the internet, other online services, or via internal or external networks.

Authors grant to the publisher the right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media. The authors reserve the following rights:

• The right to share electronic or print copies of the article with others; 
• The right to use all or part of the article in their future lectures, books, or edited volumes in non-commercial and commercial use; 
• The right to use the article within an employer’s institution for educational or research purposes; 
• The right to post an electronic version of the article on their personal website or blog, on employer’s website/repository and on free public servers in the subject

While realizing these rights, the authors need to provide full reference and explicit acknowledgement of the initial appearance of the article in IJSSH.

Social Sciences and Humanities
Electronic versions of the accepted article must include a link to the published version of the article together with the following text. The definitive version is available at https://sciencescholar.us/journal/index.php/ijssh. Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified, along with a link to an electronic version of the article, including the type of license as specified in the Journal. Use of the article in whole or part in any medium requires attribution suitable in form and content. This text (title) is derivative of the article (title) of the author (name and last name), published in IJSSH (volume, issue, year). For any reuse or distribution, users must include the copyright notice and make clear to others that the article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License license, linking to the relevant Creative Commons web page. The Creative Commons Attribution License does not affect the moral rights of authors, including without limitation the right not to have their work subjected to derogatory treatment. It also does not affect any other rights held by authors or third parties regarding the article, including the rights of privacy and publicity. Upon acceptance of the manuscript and before the manuscript is published, the author or the corresponding author (for manuscripts with more than one author) will be asked to sign a warranty and copyright agreement. 

Digital archiving policy
SS used PKP Preservation Network (PN). PKP has developed the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) to digitally preserve IJSSH. The LOCKSS program offers decentralized and distributed preservation, seamless perpetual access, and preservation of the authentic original version of the content. The PKP PN ensures that International Journal of Health Sciences that are not part of the Global LOCKSS Network, which primarily preserves content from SS and vendors can be preserved using the LOCKSS program. For additional details about the PKP PN, click here to view our digital archiving.

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