Publication Ethics

Publishing ethics guidelines

The authors, editors and peer reviewers have to follow the standards of publication ethics for our journal which are mainly based on the Committee on Publication Ethics(COPE).

Responsibilities and duties of the authors

Authors have a responsibility to ensure that their publications are original, clear, accurate, and complete without plagiarized, confusing, misrepresenting, selective, fabricated, falsified, manipulated or unclear parts. This can be achieved by adhering the following rules:

- Authors are responsible for their submitted work following all the publishing ethics mentioned in the guidelines.

- Authors have not submitted their work to more than one journal concurrently.

- All authors should agree to the version of the manuscript submitted and their inclusion of names as co-authors.

- Authors should choose a corresponding author who act as a person of contact between the editor and the other authors and should keep them informed with the major decisions about the publication.

- Authors should represent fairly the work of other researchers regardless of whether they support or do not support their hypothesis and cite them in an accurate fair manner.

- Authors should describe the materials and methods clearly, in detail and unequivocally to permit the other researchers repeat the work.

The authors should exploit the appropriate methods of data analysis and carefully check calculations and data presentations.

- Authors should present their results honestly; without fabrication, falsification, or data manipulation.

- Authors should not omit inconvenient or inexplicable results that do not support their hypothesis.

- Authors should apply copyright laws with appropriate permission when they present data, text, figures or ideas of other researchers.

- Authors should inform editors if the results have been published previously elsewhere and should provide a copy of work submitted to other journals.

- Authors should acknowledge all sources of data used in the development of the research.

- Authors should disclose all funding sources and state clearly relevant conflicts of interest.

- Authors should not copy references from other publications if they have not read the cited work.

- Authors have not published their research elsewhere in any language. 

- Authors should inform the editor if they withdraw their work from review.

- Authors should respond to reviewers’ comments in a professional and timely manner.

- Authors should communicate with the editors immediately when they discover a significant error or inaccuracy in the submitted, accepted or published work and cooperate with them in issuing the corrections.

Responsibilities and duties of the editors

To accomplish the maximum effect within the research community, all editors should adopt clear policies that encourage maximum transparency and complete and honest reporting adhering to the following universal standards:

- Editors should keep all information of the manuscript confidential.

- Editors have a responsibility for everything they publish so that they should adopt the appropriate procedures and policies in place to ensure the quality of the submitted material and maintain the integrity of the research work submitted.

- Editors may reject, in a fair and unbiased way, a manuscript without peer review when it is deemed unsuitable for the journal’s readers or is of poor quality.

- Editors must match peer reviewers with sufficient expertise without conflicts of interest to get the best reviews possible.

- Editor should guard the double-blinded review which is followed by the Egyptian Journal of Horticulture in which the editors mediate all interactions between reviewers and authors, protecting authors and reviewers’ identities unless the peer review system.

- Editors must protect the confidentiality of authors’ material and remind reviewers to do so as well.

- Editors should assure that all manuscripts are evaluated in a fair and impartial manner based on the intellectual content of the manuscript regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, citizenry nor political values of authors and also ensure that authors are not pressured to cite specific publications for non-scientific reasons.

- Editors should make fair and unbiased decisions regardless of the commercial considerations.

- Editors should adopt appropriate policies in place for handling editorial conflicts of interest.

- Editors should not give any indication of a paper’s status with the journal to anyone other than the authors.

- Editors should inform the author with the final editorial decision and reasons and state clearly all editorial processes for authors if a manuscript is rejected.

- Editors should control the timeliness of peer review and publication process.

- Editors should publish a correction or erratum immediately when the authors discover significant error or inaccuracy in the submitted, accepted or published work. 

- All editors should be fully familiar with the journal policies, vision, and scope. The final responsibility for all decisions rests with the editor-in-chief.

- Editors can review a manuscript (perhaps if one of the reviewers could not return a report), provided that they do this transparently.

Responsibilities and duties of the peer reviewers

The Egyptian Journal of Horticulture welcomes anyone who is interested in becoming a peer reviewer adhering to the following responsibilities and duties based on the double-blinded peer review being used in our journal:

- Peer reviewers should provide the journal with accurate personal, professional and contact information. 

- Peer reviewers should have the necessary qualification and expertise to assess and judge the manuscript. 

- Peer reviewers should ensure the integrity of the work submitted.

- Peer reviewers should be fully aware of their ethical obligations.

- Peer reviewers should conduct reviews in an ethical and unbiased manner within a proposed time.

- Peer reviewers should keep all information of the manuscript confidential.

- Peer reviewers should suggest changes that improve clarity of the manuscript and they do not attempt to rewrite it to their own preferred style if it is basically clear.

- Peer reviewers should refrain from suggesting that authors include citations to their works to increase citation counts or to enhance the visibility of their works if these works do not be based on valid academic reasons.

- Peer reviewers should notify the editor-in-chief their disagreement to review a manuscript if they are working at the same institution as any of the authors or if they have any conflict interests.

- Peer reviewers should not agree to review a manuscript which is very similar to one they have in preparation or under publication.

- Peer reviewers should notify the editor-in-chief if they discover any irregularities regarding the research ethics and they do not personally investigate unless the journal asks for additional information or advice.

- Peer reviewers should prepare the review report by themselves following the journal’s instructions.

- Peer reviewers should be specific in their critique, and provide supporting evidence with appropriate references to substantiate general statements, to help the editors in their evaluation.

- Reviewers should provide the editors with a fair, honest, and unbiased assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript.

- The journal asks the reviewers for a recommendation to accept/revise/reject based on the comments provided in the review.