Publishing Ethics
Maintaining a high standard of publication ethics is crucial to preserving the integrity of academic research. The Journal of Computational and Cognitive Engineering (JCCE) strictly monitors editorial workflows to deter misconduct and evaluate submissions objectively.
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Compliance
The Journal of Computational and Cognitive Engineering is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and actively follows COPE core guidelines and flowcharts to handle structural cases of research, review, and publication misconduct accordingly.
Ethical Guidelines for Stakeholders
Expand the sections below to review the explicit moral and professional mandates demanded from authors, peer reviewers, and editors.
Authors preparing manuscripts for JCCE evaluation must:
- Ensure their work is entirely original, written by them, and lacks uncredited copying.
- Obtain definitive permission to reuse any previously published content, including figures, tables, or copyrighted matrices, ensuring work does not infringe on privacy or intellectual property rights.
- Ensure their work has not been previously published in any peer-reviewed literature stream.
- Disclose all relationships, corporate financial backings, or personal interests that could inappropriately influence or bias their work.
- Acknowledge that simultaneous submission of a manuscript to more than one journal is strictly prohibited.
- Uphold that the authorship string of the paper is accurately represented without omitting valid contributors.
- Refrain from engaging in unethical practices such as plagiarism, data fabrication, figure manipulation, knowingly providing incorrect data, or academic fraud.
Journal editors managing review workflows should:
- Strive to ensure that peer review in their journal tracks is entirely fair, unbiased, and executed in a timely manner.
- Ensure that all published reports and reviews have been evaluated by suitably qualified external experts.
- Make unilateral decisions to accept or reject manuscripts based solely on importance, originality, structural clarity, and study validity, free from owner or third-party commercial interference.
- Require reviewers to explicitly disclose any potential competing or conflicting interests before agreeing to evaluate a file.
- Keep the peer-review pipeline completely confidential, ensuring no external correspondence is shared outside the secure assessment loop.
Peer reviewers evaluating JCCE manuscript assets must:
- Only agree to review manuscripts for which they possess the specialized subject expertise required to carry out an objective, timely assessment.
- Respect the confidentiality of the peer review block and not reveal any details of a manuscript or its review metrics during or after the process.
- Not use information obtained during peer review for their own, or any other entity's advantage, or to disadvantage or discredit others.
- Declare all potential conflicting interests, seeking advice from the editorial office if unsure of a relevant intersection.
- Not allow reviews to be influenced by manuscript origins, nationality, religious or political beliefs, gender profiles, or commercial parameters.
- Be completely objective and constructive, refraining from hostile or inflammatory rhetoric, or derogatory personal remarks.
- Acknowledge that peer review is a reciprocal scientific endeavor and execute their fair share of evaluations promptly.
- Provide accurate, true personal and professional representations of expertise, recognizing that impersonation is a serious misconduct vector.
Allegations of Misconduct & Retractions
Plagiarism and Data Fabrication: Plagiarism constitutes the theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work. Duplicate publication occurs when an author reuses substantial chunks of their own published data logs without providing appropriate bibliographic references. Fabricating data or manipulating visual elements is strictly prohibited.
Investigation Procedure: Allegations should be sent via email to the Editor-in-Chief (Email: harishg58iitr@gmail.com). If the concern involves the Editor-in-Chief, submit reports directly to the Managing Editor at the Journal Editorial Office. The team will immediately evaluate the specificity of the allegation. A definitive response or interim evaluation report will be provided within 4 weeks.
Retraction Policy: Editors will actively execute retractions if there is clear evidence that findings are unreliable (due to major error, fabrication, or image manipulation), if it constitutes plagiarism, redundant publication without disclosure, unauthorized data usage, or unethical research. Retraction notices will explain the cause and link to the source entry in the next print/electronic release.
Recommended COPE Flowchart Resources:
- Plagiarism in a submitted manuscript: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.1
- Redundant publication in a published article: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.13
- Fabricated data in a submitted manuscript: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.3
- Fabricated data in a published article: https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.4
Human or Animal Subjects Research
Informed Consent Statements: Manuscripts involving human participants, data, or tissues must include a statement confirming informed consent. Right to privacy must always be observed. Identifying details (names, birth dates) must not be published unless essential and accompanied by written informed consent. Rationale for verbal consent must be logged inside the editor comment terminal.
Ethics Approval Mandates: Authors must obtain approval (or official waiver) from their relevant Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Ethics Committee. Research must comply with the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki, as revised in 2024.
Template Example: "All subjects provided informed consent for inclusion before participating in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."
Clinical Trials Registration: JCCE adheres to ICMJE guidelines requiring clinical trials to be registered in a recognized public trials registry at or before first patient enrollment. Trial numbers must be logged at the end of the abstract.
All animal experimentation must strictly comply with the ARRIVE guidelines. Experiments must be executed in accordance with the U.K. Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, EU Directive 2010/63/EU, or the U.S. Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
Manuscripts must identify the institutional licensing committee approving the protocol, including all relevant details. If no animal ethics board is accessible locally, work will be evaluated case-by-case by review experts, and authors must provide a statement justifying the work from an ethical perspective.
Authors may lodge an appeal if they demonstrate that a rejection was based on a major misunderstanding over a technical aspect, or a absolute failure to grasp the scientific advance shown. Appeals requesting a second opinion without technical justification are rejected. Contact the Editorial Office via email quoting your manuscript ID. Appeals are restricted solely to the original submitting author.