Publication Ethics and Publication Misconduct Statement

COPE have ten core practices, covering allegations of misconduct, authorship and contributorship, complaints and appeals, conflicts of interest and competing interests, data and reproducibility, ethical oversight, intellectual property, journal management, the peer review process, and post-publication discussions and corrections. TISJ fully adheres to these practices, if you suspect any kind of violation of these ethics policies, please contact the journal by email: journal@topitalianscientists.org.

The Editors of this journal enforce a rigorous peer-review process together with strict ethical policies and standards to guarantee to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication.

Duties of Editors

Articles will be evaluated exclusively on the basis of their relevance to the scope of the journal.

Editors may submit papers to the journal, but if they do so, then all information about the processing of those papers will be hidden from their view and they will have no part in the decision process.

Editors who have a significant conflict of interest connected with a paper will declare it to the other editors and will avoid participating in the decision process.

Duties of Reviewers

Reviewers asked for quick opinions are expected to be objective and to provide them promptly. Should they have a conflict of interest, or should they lack the expertise to make a judgment with confidence, they should make this clear to the editors and should decline to review the paper.

More detailed reports take longer to provide. For such reports, an initial deadline will be set by the handling editor: if it is felt by a reviewer to be unrealistic, then he or she should agree an alternative with the editor. Since a paper that reaches this stage of the reviewing process will normally have been judged to be interesting enough to publish, the focus of the more detailed report should be the correctness of the paper and the quality of its writing. However, opinions about its quality and interest are also welcomed.

Reviewers are expected to keep confidential the information that the paper has been submitted to TISJ, except that if the paper is rejected and the reviewer receives it again to evaluate for another journal, then the information that the paper has been rejected by TISJ may be shared (confidentially) with the editorial board of the other journal.

In some cases, it is not reasonable to expect a reviewer to check the correctness of a paper down to the last detail. In such cases, editors may be satisfied with indirect evidence that a paper is likely to be correct. (For example, it may be that the general outline of the argument is convincing, but that the technical details involved in converting the outline into a complete proof are very complicated.) Thus, publication in TISJ should not be considered an absolute guarantee of correctness, just as in practice it is not a guarantee for any other journal. Readers who discover important errors in Advances in Combinatorics papers are strongly encouraged to report them to the journal: as stated above, if we are made aware of an error, we will add a prominent notification of the error to the editorial introduction to the paper, after appropriate consultation with the author(s).

Advances in Combinatorics does not normally copy-edit articles. We therefore ask our reviewers to point out minor errors such as spelling mistakes. Should these be very numerous, then a more general statement to the effect that the paper should be thoroughly checked for small errors will be sufficient.

Duties of Authors

Authors should submit original work only (except if it this is clearly not the intention of the article – as might be the case, for example, with a survey paper). Any results that are not due to the authors should be clearly cited. Copying or paraphrasing substantial parts of another paper without attribution is unacceptable, as is any other form of plagiarism.

No paper should be submitted to TISJ that is already published elsewhere or is being considered for publication by another journal.

Those named as authors of a paper should have made a substantial contribution to the paper, or to a more general project of which the paper is a part, and anybody who has made such a contribution should be offered authorship.

Authors who discover important errors in their articles, whether published or under consideration for publication, should notify the journal promptly.