The Sustainable Development Goals are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection.

Scienceline Publications, Ltd is pleased to declare its commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) Publishers Compact. It aims to accelerate progress to achieve SDGs by 2030.

Signatories aspire to develop sustainable practices and act as champions of the SDGs during the Decade of Action (2020-2030), publishing books and journals that will help inform, develop, and inspire action in that direction.

Furthermore, Scienceline Publications, Ltd as a signatory of SDG Publishers Compact commit to:

1. Committing to the SDGs: Stating sustainability policies and targets on our website, including adherence to this Compact; incorporating SDGs and their targets as appropriate. 

2. Actively promoting and acquiring content that advocates for themes represented by the SDGs, such as equality, sustainability, justice and safeguarding and strengthening the environment. 

3. Annually reporting on progress towards achieving SDGs, sharing data and contribute to benchmarking activities, helping to share best practices and identify gaps that still need to be addressed. 

4. Nominating a person who will promote SDG progress, acting as a point of contact and coordinating the SDG themes throughout the organization. 

5. Raising awareness and promoting the SDGs among staff to increase awareness of SDG-related policies and goals and encouraging projects that will help achieve the SDGs by 2030. 

6. Raising awareness and promoting the SDGs among suppliers, to advocate for SDGs and to collaborate on areas that need innovative actions and solutions. 

7. Becoming an advocate to customers and stakeholders by promoting and actively communicating about the SDG agenda through marketing, websites, promotions, and projects. 

8. Collaborating across cities, countries, and continents with other signatories and organizations to develop, localize and scale projects that will advance progress on the SDGs individually or through their Publishing Association. 

9. Dedicating budget and other resources towards accelerating progress for SDG-dedicated projects and promoting SDG principles. 

10. Taking action on at least one SDG goal, either as an individual publisher or through your national publishing association and sharing progress annually. 

 

To analyze UN SDGs research using Elsevier’s SciVal, please click here.

 

Scienceline Publications, Ltd endorses all 17 goals of the SDGs:

 

 

 

 

 


We suggest that authors whose first language is not English have their manuscripts checked by a native English speaker for copy editing or language editing before submission to Scienceline Journals or at the revision stage.

You can also get a fast, free grammar check of your manuscript that takes into account all aspects of readability in English. Or consider using other worthy services of American Journal Experts (USA) and or London Proofreaders (UK).

This is optional, but will help to ensure that any submissions that reach peer review can be judged exclusively on academic merit.

In addition, we may offer a Scienceline services (English editing, additional scientific editing, and translation) in a modest fee, for those articles that are in the revision stage, upon request.

Please note that use of English language editing service is voluntary, and at the author’s own expense. Also, use of these services does not guarantee that the newly submitted manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Scienceline journals.

You can send the article/s to the following Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The authors cay pay the fees via iyzico Online Payment Gateway (accepts American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, and Visa)

 

Authorship
Author is the one who has made a substantive intellectual contribution to a paper (for example, to the research question, design, analysis, interpretation, and written description) and also understands his/her role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.
Authorship is a way of making explicit both credit and responsibility for the contents of published articles. Credit and responsibility are inseparable. The guiding principle for authorship decisions is to present an honest account of what took place. Criteria for authorship apply to all intellectual products, including print and electronic publications of words, data, and images. Journals should make their policies on authorship transparent and accessible (https://wame.org/authorship ).
Authorship has important academic, social, and financial consequences which implies responsibility and accountability for the published work. Since authorship does not normally communicate what contributions make an individual qualified to be an author. Editors are strongly encouraged to develop and implement a contributorship policy, as well as a policy that identifies who is responsible for the integrity of the work as a whole. Such policies remove much of the ambiguity surrounding contributions but leave unresolved the question of the quantity and quality of contribution that qualify an individual for authorship. Scienceline Publication has thus developed criteria for authorship that can be used by Scienceline journals, including those that distinguish authors from other contributors.
 
Criteria for Authorship
The author is the only one who has made substantial intellectual contributions to the manuscript. Collaborations like technical services, translation, preparation of patients for the study, supplying materials, funding, or facility administrative oversight where the work was done are not, in themselves, sufficient for authorship; however, these contributions may be acknowledged in the manuscript. One author (a “guarantor”) should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole. It is often the corresponding author who submits the manuscript and receives reviews although other authors can play this role. All authors should approve the final version of the manuscript. It is preferable that all authors be familiar with all aspects of the work. However, modern research is often done in teams with complementary expertise so every author may not be equally familiar with all aspects of the work. Therefore, some authors’ contributions may be limited to specific aspects of the work as a whole.
 
Number and Order of Authors
Editors should not arbitrarily limit the number of authors. There are legitimate reasons for multiple authors in some kinds of research, such as multi-center, randomized controlled trials. In these situations, a subset of authors may be listed with the title, with the notation that they have prepared the manuscript on behalf of all contributors, who are then listed in an appendix to the published article. Alternatively, a “corporate” author (e.g., a “Group” name) representing all authors in a named study may be listed, as long as one investigator takes responsibility for the work as a whole. In either case, all individuals listed as authors should meet the criteria for authorship whether or not they are listed explicitly on the byline. If editors believe the number of authors is unusually large, relative to the scope and complexity of the work, they can ask for a detailed description of each author’s contributions to the work. If some do not meet the criteria for authorship, editors can ask for the removal of their names as a condition of publication.
The authors themselves should decide the order in which authors are listed in an article. No one else knows as well as they do their respective contributions and the agreements they have made among themselves. Many different criteria are used to decide the order of authorship. Among these are relative contributions to the work and, in situations where all authors have contributed equally, alphabetical or random order. Readers cannot know, and should not assume, the meaning of the order of authorship unless the approach to assigning order has been described by the authors. Authors may want to include with their manuscript a description of how the order was decided. If so, editors should welcome this information and publish it with the manuscript.
 
Retained Author's Rights and Obligations
All authors who publish their research papers in Scienceline journals are entitled to the following rights and obligations:
  1. Authors hold full copyright and self-archiving rights, they transfer the publishing rights to Scienceline Publication
  2. We do decline to publish material where a pre-print or working paper has been previously mounted online.
  3. We do not allow authors to use Artificial intelligence (AIs) such as ChatGPT to produce papers. A machine tool cannot be an author of a research or even review papers, textbooks or book chapters. Scienceline have a zero tolerance policy on content generated or altered (paraphrased plagiarism) by AIs. Scienceline editors use GPTZero (AI Detector) built by Princeton University student Edward Tian (https://gptzero.me/), and if role of a ChatGPT is detected, the article will be immediately rejected. For more information about Authors' Responsibilities on AIs, please visit WAME Recommendations on ChatGPT and Chatbots in Relation to Scholarly Publications.
  4. We allow authors to get their seminar papers published with a note about the seminar if the paper is not mounted online.
  5. The research and review papers published in Scienceline Publication can be archived in any private or public archives online or offline. For this purpose, authors need to use the final published papers downloaded from the Website
  6. Authors are allowed to archive their article in open access repositories as “post-prints”. (Please note that: a post-print is the version incorporating changes and modifications resulting from peer-review comments.)
  7. The authors need to acknowledge the original reference to the published paper when used in some other format like ePub or audio files.
  8. Scienceline journals offers Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 )  to researchers and scholar who uses the content of the published papers.
  9. Authors are free to use a link to our published papers and share the published papers online or offline in the final format printed on the Journal website.
  10. Authors can index and store the published papers in private or public archives or repositories like university database, internet archives, academia, researchgate etc.
  11. We promote sharing of knowledge with due credit to the authors and researchers of the papers published with Scienceline Publication.
Authorship Changes, Disputes, and Agreement
After the manuscript is submitted or accepted for publication, the corresponding author is required to send a request through the signed change of authorship form to add or remove an author or to rearrange the author names of the submitted/accepted manuscript. All the authors should approve any change in authorship (i.e., adding, removing or reordering existing authors) after initial submission. Authors should determine the order of authorship among themselves. In addition, any alterations must be clarified to the Editor/Editor-in-chief via the AAF - Authorship Agreement Form (for example: see AAF for JLSB).
Disputes about authorship are best settled at the local level before the journal reviews the manuscript. However, at their discretion, editors may become involved in resolving authorship disputes. Changes in authorship at any stage of manuscript review, revision, or acceptance should be accompanied by a written request and explanation from all of the original authors. In this case, the Editor also asks the authors for a filled-out and signed Authorship Agreement Form (for example, JLSB-AAF). In order to disseminate the authors’ research work, the publishers need publishing rights. For open access articles, the publisher uses an exclusive licensing agreement in which authors retain copyright in their manuscripts.
 
Reporting Standards
Authors of original research should present their study and its data accurately as well as discussing the results and significance of the work, so that sufficient detail and references permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable. Review and professional publication articles should also be accurate and objective, and editorial ‘opinion’ works should be clearly identified as such.
 
Data Access and Retention
Authors should provide the research data supporting their paper for editorial review and/or comply with the open data requirements of the journal. Also, they should provide public access to such data, for a reasonable number of years after publication. Authors may refer to their journal’s Guide for Authors for further details.
 
Originality and Acknowledgement of Sources
The authors should write entirely original works, but in case the authors have used others' work and words, they should ensure that this has been appropriately cited or that permission has been obtained as well as a proper acknowledgment of the work of others. Authors should cite the most influenced publications. Conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, is allowed only if permission has been obtained from the source.
Plagiarism takes many forms, and in all its forms constitutes unethical behavior and is unacceptable.
 
Multiple, Redundant or Concurrent Publication
Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical behavior and is unacceptable. Generally, an author should not submit a previously published paper for consideration in another journal, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis or as an electronic preprint, clinical guidelines, and translations. Further detail on acceptable forms of secondary publication can be found in the ICMJE Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals: http://www.icmje.org/ ].
 
Confidentiality
Information obtained during confidential services, such as reviewing manuscripts or grant requests, should not be used without the express written permission of the author.

Human and Animal Subjects and Possible Hazards
User License Agreement
Scienceline Publication provides access to archived material through Scienceline Publication Repository (eprints), which supports Open Archives Initiative (OAI 2.0) with a base URL of http://eprints.science-line.com/cgi/oai2?verb=IdentifyAll articles published open access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. Permitted reuse is defined by Creative Commons user license called "Creative Common Attribution" (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, share, distribution, and reproduction in any platform and medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
Conflict of Interest
Authors are requested to evident whether impending conflicts do or do not exist by signing conflict of interest disclosure form (Scienceline journals prefer to use the ICMJE Disclosure of Interest Form available here: http://www.icmje.org/downloads/coi_disclosure.docx ).
  • WAME define conflict of interest as “a divergence between an individual’s private interests (competing interests) and his or her responsibilities to scientific and publishing activities, such that a reasonable observer might wonder if the individual’s behavior or judgment was motivated by considerations of his or her competing interests” [WAME Editorial statement on COI ]. All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could be viewed as inappropriately influencing (bias) their work.
  • All sources of financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article should be disclosed, as should the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement then this should be stated.
  • Examples of potential conflicts of interest which should be disclosed include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest possible stage [WAME Editorial statement on COI ].
Responsibilities on Conflicts of Interest
Public trust in the scientific process and the credibility of published articles depend in part on how transparently conflicts of interest are handled during the planning, implementation, writing, peer review, editing, and publication of scientific work. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, and intellectual beliefs. All authors should comply with the journals’ policies on conflict of interest. All participants in the peer-review and publication process, not only authors but also peer reviewers, editors, and editorial board members of journals must consider their conflicts of interest when fulfilling their roles in the process of article review and publication and must disclose all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest.
  1. Authors: When authors submit a manuscript of any type or format they are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships that might bias or be seen to bias their work by signing conflict of interest disclosure form.
  2. Reviewers: Reviewers should be asked at the time they are asked to critique a manuscript if they have conflicts of interest that could complicate their review. Reviewers must disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the manuscript, and should recuse themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if the potential for bias exists. Reviewers must not use knowledge of the work they’re reviewing before its publication to further their own interests.
  3. Editors: Editors who make final decisions about manuscripts should recuse themselves from editorial decisions if they have conflicts of interest or relationships that pose potential conflicts related to articles under consideration. Other editorial staff members who participate in editorial decisions must provide editors with a current description of their financial interests or other conflicts (as they might relate to editorial judgments) and recuse themselves from any decisions in which a conflict of interest exists. Editorial staff must not use information gained through working with manuscripts for private gain. Editors should publish regular disclosure statements about potential conflicts of interests related to the commitments of journal staff. Guest editors should follow these same procedures.
Reporting Conflicts of Interest
Articles should be published with statements or supporting documents, such as the Scienceline Publication conflict of interest form, declaring:
   1. Authors’ conflicts of interest; and
    2. Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources if any in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; the decision to submit the report for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement; and
    3. Whether the authors had access to the study data, with an explanation of the nature and extent of access, including whether access is on-going.

To support the above statements, editors may request that authors of a study sponsored by a funder with a proprietary or financial interest in the outcome sign a statement, such as “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Fundamental Errors
If the authors see any inconsistency, inaccuracy and significant error or in their own published article, they should promptly notify the journal editor or publisher. If an error is informed by a third party to the editor or publisher, the author should cooperate with the editor, in this regards.
 
Image Integrity
Move, remove, or introducing a specific feature within an image is not allowed. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if they do not eliminate any information from original source. Manipulating images for improved clarity is accepted. Authors should comply with any specific policy for graphical images applied by the relevant journal, e.g. providing the original images as supplementary material with the article, or depositing these in a suitable repository.
 
Graphical Abstract
Authors may be asked to provide a graphical abstract (a beautifully designed feature figure) to represent the paper aiming to catch the attention and interest of readers. Graphical abstract is normally published online in the table of content of journal. The graphical abstract should be colored, and kept within an area of 12 cm (width) x 6 cm (height) or with similar format. Image should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi and line art 1200dpi.
Note: Height of the image is generally no more than the width. Authors should avoid putting too much information into the graphical abstract as it occupies only a small space. The graphical abstract can be presented in the format of PowerPoint, Word, PDF, JPG, PNG or TIFF, after a manuscript is accepted for publication. Samples of Professional Graphical Abstracts, are available in
JWPR, WVJ, OJAFR, JLSB, JCEU.

 

Related links

All the Scienceline Journals are Gold Open Access that provides immediate open access to the content (articles) published in the journal, on the principle that making research freely available on the Internet to support a greater global exchange of knowledge. The term "Gold Open Access" refers to open access journals of both large and small publishers that are financed via author fees (APC - Article Processing Charges).

The standard fee for making your article Open Access in Scienceline Journals is EUR €150 for each article accepted (unless stated otherwise under the "Submitting articles" tab on the journal's home page).


 

How does the process work?

If you aim to publish your work via the gold open access option, you are welcome to submit your article to the Scienceline journal of your choice in the normal way. When your article has been accepted for publication you will be asked to pay the APC via a payment method: either by credit card, or by invoice to your institution or research funder with their permission.


Does Scienceline Support Institutional Funding for APCs?

Please contact us if you are interested in discussing institutional payment models for article processing charges (APCs) for members of your organization.


 

What are my Open Access Licensing options?

Scienceline gives authors of open access articles the option to choose from two Creative Commons licenses in order to enable the open publication of their articles:

 

CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0

According to the Creative Commons website: "This license CC BY, lets other distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials."

The authors are required to grant Scienceline Journals an exclusive license for open access publication of their article with a Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, share, distribution, and reproduction in any platform and medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.

 

CC BY-NC: Creation Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0

Creative Commons License

According to the Creative Commons website: "This license is the restrictive of the CC licenses, allowing others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, remix, transform, and build upon the material, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially." The content published by Scienceline Journals (from 2011 to 2017) is often licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Please note that all authors whose research work is funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust must select the CC BY license in accordance with those funder mandates effective from 1 April 2013. Other funders will have their specific policies. Please check the requirements of your own research funder before selecting a license: licenses cannot be changed after publication.

If you post your article on any website or repository, acknowledgement in the form of a full citation should be given to the journal as the original source of publications, together with a link to the journal webpage and/or DOI as soon as they are available. Such information will help in getting the work cited.


 

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA), simply means publications are freely available online to all at no cost and with limited restrictions with regards reuse.

It is definitely not vanity publishing or self-publishing, nor about the literature that scholars might normally expect to be paid for, such as books for which they hope to earn royalty payments. It concerns the outputs that scholars normally give away free to be published – peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and datasets of various kinds."

The unrestricted distribution of study results is especially important for authors (as their work gets seen by more people), readers (as they can access and build on the most recent work in the field) and funders (as the work they fund has broader impact by being able to reach a wider audience).

An overview of fully OA journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The formal definitions of Open Access are the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) definitions and they are usually referred to as a consolidated 'BBB definition'.

 

There are two forms to open access: Gold OA and Green OA

Gold OA makes a published work freely and permanently accessible for everyone, immediately after copyright and permission is retained by the authors. Both Fully OA and hybrid (subscription-based journal) journals publish articles per Gold OA that allows the re-use of the work as long as the authors are acknowledged and cited as they retain the copyright.

Green OA, also referred to as self-archiving, is the practice of placing a version of an author’s manuscript into a repository, making it freely accessible for everyone. The version that can be deposited into a repository is dependent on the funder or publisher. Unlike Gold OA the copyright for these articles usually sits with the publisher of, or the society affiliated with, the title and there are restrictions as to how the work can be reused. There are individual self-archiving policies by journal or publisher that determine the terms and conditions e.g. which article version may be used and when the article can be made openly accessible in the repository (also called an embargo period). A list of publishers’ self-archiving policies can be found on the SHERPA/RoMEO database.


 

Benefits of Gold Open Access

  • Greater visibility and impact: A broader distribution and increased visibility and citation of articles when are freely and permanently available online immediately upon publication than subscription content (restricted access);
  • Content published under a Creative Commons licence can be archived anywhere and allow authors to easily comply with funder requirements;
  • Retention of copyright by authors;
  • Moves research along faster and the paper can be carried out and published quicker. This is especially important in time sensitive fields and topics (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic);
  • Greater public engagement especially when content affects the general public (e.g. patient groups);
  • Better management and assessment of research
  • Provides the material on which the new semantic web tools for data-mining and text-mining can work, generating new knowledge from existing findings;
  • Incorporates local research into interoperable network of global knowledge;
  • Increases impact of local research, providing new contacts and research partnerships for authors;
  • Removes professional isolation;
  • And can support the development of indigenous and science-based knowledge

 

Additional information for better understanding of Open Access

 


 
 

Related links

 

 

Appealing the Editorial Decision

Submissions may be rejected without external review with a very general statement of the rejection decision. Generally, these decisions are not qualified for a formal appeal. However, authors who believe that their submission was rejected due to a misunderstanding or the decision was not in accordance with journal policy and procedures, may appeal the decision by sending the editor a comprehensive detailed response to the issues raised in the rejection letter (and not to justify the interest, novelty, or suitability of the manuscript for the journal).
The editor-in-chief (EiC) and editors will consider the appeal without giving any guarantee to accept the manuscript and thereafter if the Editor’s decision following the editorial criteria is rejection of the article, it will be deemed final.
In case of any dissatisfaction with the way the editors has handled the authors appeal, they may refer complaints to email of the journal EiC concerned, or they may contact the publisher at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

Appealing Corrective Action taken Post Publication

In case a published article is the subject of a complaint, the editor will decide on the retraction of the published article, other corrective actions, or notices on the published article. The decision will be in line with the guideline published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), including COPE’s retraction guidelines and in consultation with the publisher.
SCIENCELINE and its journals reserve the right to take corrective actions to maintain a transparent and accurate academic record.

 

General Concerns and Making A Complaint

Complaints related to content, procedures, or policies of Scienceline Publication or our editorial staff, may provide an opportunity and will definitely help us to improve the standard of our services. Anybody wishing to raise a concern or make a complaint about any aspect of publication in a Scienceline journal may email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Our editors will respond quickly, courteously, and constructively to any complaint according to the following procedure.

• In the case that the initial response is felt to be insufficient, the complainant can request to escalate their complaint to a more senior member of the team.
• If the complainant remains unhappy, complaints may be escalated to the journal's EiC, for a final decision.
• If a complainant remains unhappy after what EiC considers a definitive reply, the complainant may complain to an external party with a relevant oversight.

Complaints sent to the publisher will usually be referred to the EiC of the journal of choice.



Handling Complaints and Appeals

The following principles and processes will be considered:

Speed: All complaints will be formally acknowledged within two working days and processed as quickly as possible. We will then lead the investigation following COPE guidelines to make sure that the correct procedures have been followed or the author’s concerns have been addressed fairly and without prejudice by reviewing the paper’s peer review history and any correspondence between the author, editor, and reviewers. We may also contact the parties involved to obtain further information where necessary and in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) . Some complaints may be complex and take time to resolve fairly (for example, allowing a reasonable time for multiple parties to respond). So, we will try to resolve issues as swiftly as possible within two weeks. The final decision will be acknowledged to the author in writing.

Fairness: We will try to treat all parties involved in a complaint fairly and avoid bias either in the process or outcome. We will avoid conflicts of interest.

Confidentiality: We will only disclose information necessary to resolve a complaint in accordance with GDP regulations  .

Clarity: We will seek to be clear in all our communication, and consider the needs of those we are communicating with. In the interest of allowing due process to take place, and investigations to proceed without prejudice, we respectfully request that anyone raising a concern or complaint allow the process to conclude before publicly commenting on the case. If the author wishes to pursue their complaint further, they may contact COPE directly. Information can be found on the COPE website:  Facilitation and Integrity Subcommittee | COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics .

 

 

 

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