Duties of Editors

Duties and Responsibilities of Editors
The Chief Editors and/or Editors are responsible for the publication decisions of all manuscripts submitted to their journal. These decisions to accept or reject a paper will be based solely on the validity, originality and novelty of research works, as well as the relevance of the paper to the scope of the journal. In addition, Editors should ensure all published materials are securely archived. 

The Chief Editors and/or Editors shall be responsible to evaluate manuscripts fairly and solely on their intellectual merit and to ensure confidentiality of manuscripts and has the responsibility to decide when and which articles are to be published.

Editors with UNIMAS Publisher
Editors should work and collaborate with UNIMAS Publisher to constantly improve their journals, revise the journal policies, and assure the quality of the materials published in their journals. Editors shall solely and independently decide whether to accept or reject a manuscript based on its quality and relevance to the scope of the journal.

The Chief Editors, Editors, and members of editorial board should establish mechanisms to deal with any disagreements, dispute or conflict between themselves and UNIMAS Publisher. Chief Editors be responsible to assist and support UNIMAS Publisher to ensure proper investigation of any suspected misconducts for both published and unpublished papers, including considering the responses from those suspected of misconduct to ensure fair and unbiased investigation. Chief Editors also work and collaborate with UNIMAS Publisher to handle potential breaches of intellectual property, laws and related issues.

Editors with Authors
Editors should strive to fulfil the needs of authors and consider their views for journal process and management improvement.

Editors should check for any research and publication misconducts by the authors. Editors should also ensure all manuscripts submitted and accepted are checked for plagiarised and fabricated contents (including plagiarised texts and inappropriately altered images). UNIMAS journals use method such as Turnitin plagiarism-detection software to check for potential plagiarism or duplication of work in all submitted manuscript.

Editors shall check and verify if the authors acknowledge any research funding/grants and written informed consent for publication involving human data, research permits, animal and human ethic committee agreement forms, etc., for their submitted articles (if applicable).

Editors should ensure publication guidance and author instructions are available to the authors. Editors should consider requests from authors to exclude individual(s) to review their manuscript submission, if the reasons given are applicable and practicable. Editors should return the original reviewer reports to the authors in their entirety unless these reports contain offensive or discourteous statements. They should also allow authors to respond to the reviewers’ comments.

Authors should state their results clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation. The methods used in the work should be clearly and unambiguously described so that the findings can be repeated and confirmed by other researchers.

Authors are responsible to inform the Chief Editor or the publisher of any inaccuracy of data in their published work so that correction or retraction of article can be done.

Authors are responsible to ensure only new and original work is submitted.

Authors must not reproduce work that has been previously published in other journals and must not submit any articles that are being reviewed or considered by other journals simultaneously.

Authors are allowed to publish their work elsewhere after receiving a formal rejection from the journal or if their request to withdraw their work is officially accepted by the journal.

Authors should make significant contributions and be held accountable for any shortcoming in their work. 

Editors with Reviewers
Editors will ensure all published articles have been reviewed by timely, unbiased and qualified or appropriate reviewers with relevant expertise and free from disqualifying competing interests. Editors should maintain a database of suitable reviewers and avoid reviewers who consistently submit poor quality reviewer reports.

They should provide guidance to reviewers on the preparation of reviewer report. They should also require that the reviewers handle the manuscripts as confidential documents and without disclosure to the third party. Editors should also inform the reviewers of the need to declare any potential conflict of interests (if applicable). They should also ensure freedom of expression by the reviewers, especially on issues related to publication ethics and misconducts, manuscript originality and validity, etc.

Reviewers have the liabilities to disclose any competing interest before agreeing to review a submission and may refuse to review any submission due to a conflict of interest or inadequate knowledge.

Reviewers also obliged to review all submissions objectively, fairly and professionally, reveal any ethical misconduct encountered while reviewing to the Chief Editor for further action and should ensure the originality of a submission and be alert to any plagiarism and redundant publication.

Reviewers must not discuss the content of the submission without permission and adhere to the time allocated for the review process. They can make an application requests for extension to review the submission and this depend on the discretion of the Chief Editor to approve or not.

Editors with Editorial Board Members
Chief Editors should identify qualified editorial board members who can actively contribute to high standard journal processing and management. Comprehensive and clear guidelines with precise terms of references, should be provided to the editorial board members about their expected roles and duties. Chief Editors and/or Editors should consult the editorial board members about the improvement of the journal processing and managements, challenges and future directions.

Chief Editors and/or Editors should ensure adequate training and technologies related to the editorial processing are provided to relevant members of the editorial board (including themselves).

The Board Members shall actively contribute to the development and the greater good of the journal and act as ambassadors for the journal. They have to continuously support and promote the journal and also review any work assigned to them.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interests
The Chief Editors and/or Editors are not allowed and estopped to disclose any information in the manuscript that is being reviewed to others, or using information from research data described in the manuscript for personal benefits. 

The Chief Editors and/or Editors avoid any business needs and commercial considerations that may compromise the intellectual and ethical standards of the article publication of their journal. A conflict of interest may exist when the Chief Editors and/or Editors has a financial or personal interest that could affect his/her professional judgement on the manuscript. In this event, the Chief Editors and/or Editors hereby shall take reasonable steps to secure and withhold themselves from making any financial editorial decision which they have any conflict of interest related to the manuscript.

The Chief Editors and/or Editors may submit manuscripts to their journal for publication consideration. However, they should declare this to the editorial board members. They cannot be involved in the reviewing process and should avoid from making editorial decisions related to their own manuscript.

Timeliness of the Publication Process
The Chief Editors and/or Editors must monitor the turnaround time for each publishing step from manuscript receipt to publication or rejection. They need to ensure timeliness of publication in each issue. They must track reviewers’ and editors’ performance, backlog of accepted manuscripts, and provide prompt responses and decisions for manuscripts.

Errata, Retractions and Clarifications
Editors should publish errata or corrections, clarifications, or retractions of any materials when needed and as quickly as possible, if competing interests are detected after publication.

Direct link between the original article and the errata or the corrected articles must be provided for all online journals.

References:
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (2016). Code of Conduct. Available at: https://publicationethics.org/resources/code-conduct

Council of Science Editors (2018). White Paper on Publication Ethics. Available at: https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorial-policies/white-paper-on-publication-ethics/

European Science Foundation (2011). The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Available at: https://www.nsf.gov/od/oise/Code_Conduct_ResearchIntegrity.pdf

Kassirer, JP (1995). Authorship criteria. Science, 268: 785-786.

Mandal, J, Ponnambath, DK, & Parija, SC. (2016). Ethics of scientific publication. Tropical Parasitology, 6(2): 100-102.

Nature Cell Biology. (2014). Improving author experience. Exploring avenues to optimize the peer-reivew process and improve author experience. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncb3081

Natural Research Journals’ Policies on publishing ethics. Available at: https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/publication.html

Nature Nanotechnology (2012). A matter of duty. Corresponding authors should not neglect their responsibility to a journal or their co-authors. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2012.234

PLoS Medicine. Ethical Publishing Practice. Available at: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/s/ethical-publishing-practice

Science Journals: editorial policies. Available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/authors/science-journals-editorial-policies