Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Editorial Policies and Ethics

Open-Access Policy

Agrology is an open access journal: it is free to view, read, download and print. The contents of the journal are accessible soon as it is published.

Principles

The Agrology journal editorial policy is based on the principles of objectivity and equanimity in the picking of articles for publication; high demand for the quality of scientific research; compulsory peer review of the articles; adherence to collegiality in decision-making regarding publication of articles; accessibility and efficiency in communication with authors; strict observance of copyright and related rights.

The editorial board should have a clear policy for handling concerns or allegations of misconduct that may arise regarding authors, reviewers, editors, and others. The editorial board does not have the resources or authority to conduct a formal forensic investigation or issue a formal finding regarding misconduct. That process is the role of the individual's employer, university, granting agency, or regulator. However, the editorial board has a responsibility to help protect the integrity of the public scientific record by reporting reasonable concerns to the authorities who can conduct such an investigation. Deception may be intentional, reckless disregard of possible consequences, or ignorance. An editorial board's preliminary investigation of potential misconduct will consider not only the specific act or omission but also the apparent intent of the individual involved, since the primary purpose of misconduct is to deliberately deceive others about the truth. The editorial board will assume that misconduct does not include unintentional error. Data falsification includes variations in data preparation, selective reporting of results, omission of inconsistent data, or intentional concealment and/or distortion of data.

Plagiarism: appropriating the language, ideas, or thoughts of another person without attribution and presenting them as your own original work.

Misattribution: misattribution, such as excluding others, misrepresenting the same material as original in more than one publication, including as authors individuals who have made no specific contribution to a published work, or submitting publications with multiple authors without the consent of all authors.

Misappropriation of others' ideas: sharing ideas among colleagues is an important aspect of the scientific enterprise. Scientists may acquire new ideas from others during the review of grant applications and manuscripts. However, misuse of such information may constitute fraud. Mass appropriation of such material constitutes misconduct.

Misappropriation of generally accepted research practices: serious deviation from generally accepted practices in proposing or conducting research, improper manipulation of experiments to obtain biased results, misleading statistical or analytical manipulation, or misrepresentation of results.

All allegations of misconduct will be forwarded to the Editor-in-Chief, who will discuss the perculiarities of the case with the Associate Editors. Initial fact-finding typically includes a request for all parties involved to state their positions and explain the circumstances in writing. In questions of research misconduct involving approaches or technical questions, the Editor-in-Chief can consult confidentially with experts who are blind to the identities of the individuals or, if the allegation is against an editor, with an external expert editor. The Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editors will conclude whether there is sufficient evidence to lead a reasonable person to be sure that misconduct may have occurred. Their purpose is not to determine whether actual misconduct has occurred or the precise details of that misconduct. The peer review and publication process for the manuscript under consideration will be suspended pending the above process if the allegations involve the authors. The investigation described above will be prepared even when the authors retract their article, and the answers will still be considered.

In the event of allegations connected with reviewers or editors, they will be suspended temporarily from the review process until this matter is properly investigated. All such allegations must be kept confidential. The number of inquiries and persons involved must be kept to the minimum necessary to achieve this. Written references to the matter should be anonymous whenever possible. The editorial board has a duty to readers to ensure that published research is accurate and meets the highest ethical standards. Therefore, if the investigation concludes that there is a reasonable possibility of misconduct, responses should be taken that are tailored to the apparent extent of the misconduct. Responses may be used singly or in combination, and their implementation should take into account all the circumstances  of the case and the responses of the parties and institutions involved. The editorial board of the journal may retract an article for violation of the journal's ethics, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, borrowing data from reports of organizations without their permission, falsification of data, etc. The Editor-in-Chief, based on these and other types of appeals, creates a separate ethics committee, which deeply analyzes the situation and recommends that the editorial board make one of two decisions: "retract the article" or "do not retract the article."

Changes to articles published on the website cannot be made, with the exception of minor technical corrections caused by reviewers and literary editors. Further corrections will not be possible if errors in the article were caused by the authors, and the authors have approved the typeset version of the article sent by the editorial board. Authors may request that the editorial board retract the article if they do not agree with this. The editorial board marks each page of the PDF file with the word "retracted" and notes the reason for the retraction on the first page of the file within a month after this.

Publication ethics

The editorial board of Agrology, published by the Dnipro State University of Agriculture and Economics, has a certain level of requirements when selecting and receiving articles.

The Journal's ethics are based on the quality standards of researches, their presentation, accepted by the global scientific community, in particular the publishing principles of the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK), the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Ethics Code of Scientists of Ukraine, and also the experience of working with foreign and Ukrainian professional communities.

Ethical Obligations of the Editorial Board

The Editorial Board is responsible for the publication. The journal's editorial policy will encourage transparency, full and fair reporting. The editor guarantee that two sides (reviewers and authors) have a lucid understanding of what is waited of them. All materials submitted for publication are carefully selected and reviewed. The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject an article or return it for revision. An author is obliged to revise the article according to comments of the reviewers.

The Editorial Board, editors:
- impartially review all manuscripts received, evaluating them objectively, regardless of race, religion, nationality, and the position or place of work of an author (authors), and make a fair and impartial decision;

- have sole and independent responsibility to decide which manuscripts submitted to the journal should be accepted. The resonableness of the article under consideration and its significance to researchers and readers should always inform such decisions;

- are manageable by the policies of the journal's editorial board and restricted by such legal requirements as would apply to issues such as libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism;

- ensure that the peer-review process is honorable, honest, and timeous;

- consider all possible potential conflicts of interest and self-citation offers made by reviewers to see if there is potential bias;

- ensure the confidentiality of all materials offered to the journal and communications with reviewers, if something is not agreed by the corresponding authors and reviewers;

- may reject a manuscript without peer review if they believe it does not conform to the journal's profile;
- oppose falsification, plagiarism, submission of a same article to several journals, repeated copying of article content in various reports, oppose misleading the public about an authors' real contribution to a publication;
- have the right to remove a published article, provided they identify a violation of one's rights or generally accepted norms of scientific ethics. The Editorial Board reports such a fact to an author who submitted such an article and organization where the work was done.

The editor is the main creative worker in the journal, who is responsible for quality of articles published in the journal, their original, its structural, informative, scientific and linguistic and stylistic levels. The task of the editor is taking an original through all stages of the editorial and publishing process, ultimately transforming it into a specific type of publishing production and release to the world.

The editor and the editorial staff shall not provide other persons with information related to content of a manuscript under review, other than those involved in the professional evaluation of this material. After a positive opinion of the editor, the article is published in the journal and posted on electronic resources.

According to the international law regarding the control of copyright for electronic information resources, materials on the website, in the electronic journal, may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form (electronic or printed) without a prior written consent of the editorial staff. When using published materials in the context of other documents it is necessary to make reference to the source.

Editors, authors, and reviewers should report their interests, which may affect the objectivity when editing and reviewing articles (conflict of interest). Such interests may be intellectual, financial, personal, political, and religious.

Prevention of unlawful publications is the responsibility of every author, editor, reviewer, publisher and organization.

The editors should not try to increase the rating of a journal by artificially increasing any journal metric.

Ethical obligations of reviewers

Peer review of manuscripts is an important step in the publication process. Every scientist has a certain amount of work to do in the peer review process. A manuscript submitted for review is a confidential document. Reviewers should not discuss the article and review with anyone else or contact the authors without the editor's permission.

All members of the editorial board of the journal are reviewers.

The editorial board reserves the right to appoint an additional independent reviewer.

Peer review is an important part of scholarly communication and is the core of the scientific method. A reviewer should:

-make an objective assessment of the quality of the manuscript, determine whether the manuscript meets high scientific and literary standards, respect the intellectual independence of the authors;

-be vigilant to potential ethical problems in the article and keep the editor informed, including any significant similarity or coincidence between the manuscript under review and an already published article that the reviewer has already read before

Any affirmation that an investigation, result, conclusion, or reason has been previously published should be accompanied by appropriate acknowledgment;

-treat authors and their articles as they would like to be treated, and in doing so, observe review etiquette;

-conduct reviews objectively. Personal criticism of the author is unacceptable, and reviewers should clearly designate their views, supporting them with reasoned comments.

Reviewers should declare potential conflicts of interest to the editor before agreeing to review a manuscript and should discuss with the editor whether they should recuse themselves, as there may be concern about potential bias.

-provide timely feedback on the manuscript. A reviewer should not use or disclose unpublished information presented in a submitted manuscript unless the author(s) give permission to do so;

-encourage authors to consult (and possibly cite) additional sources during the review process for scholarly reasons. If an editor or reviewer asks an author to include references to the work of the editor or reviewer (or their colleagues), this should be done for sound scientific reasons and not for the purpose to raise the number of citations of the editor or reviewer or increasing the vision of their work (or the work of their colleagues);

- to recuse themselves from participating in the review process and notify the editor if they feel unqualified to review the research presented in the article or know that fast review will not be possible.

Ethical obligations of authors

The sheer fact of submitting materials for publication in the journal Agrology confirms the authorship, as well as agreement of an author that the materials submitted can be placed in the international electronic databases. The copyrights are fully reserved by authors of the published materials.

A manuscript submitted for publication or review is a confidential document.

The author’s primary responsibility is to provide an accurate report of the study as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Authors should present their results clearly and unambiguously, without distorting or manipulating the data obtained.

Authors of articles:

-bear full responsibility not only for their content but also for the fact of publication;

-are required to inform the editor of any potential conflict of interest that may arise from publication of results presented in a manuscript;

-should clearly indicate all sources of provided information, properly designing the references in accordance with the requirements.

It is unacceptable to submit plagiarism as an original work or offer to publish an article that has already been printed. The authors of such materials bear responsibility for the detection of such facts. Authors should not, in general, publish articles describing the same research in more than one journal. Submitting the same article to more than one journal simultaneously is unaccetable and unethical;

Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal simultaneously is unethical behavior and is unacceptable.Authors of an article should be those persons who have contributed to the submitted work and share responsibility for the results. An author submits a manuscript for publication, ensures that only those persons who meet the criteria of authorship are included in the list of co-authors.

The corresponding author should provide that the article lists all appropriate co-authors and no relevant co-authors, and that all co-authors have reviewed and approved the final version of the article and agreed to its submission for publication. Authors have a collective responsibility for the work. The author should fast notify the editors and cooperate with the editorial board when he or she saw a significant mistake or inaccuracy in his or her published article, in order to retract or correct the manuscript if the editor deems it necessary. The author should cooperate with the editor, including providing evidence to the editor upon request, if the editor or publisher learns from a third party that a published work contains mistake. Those who have participated in editing the language or technical design of figures in an article may be acknowledged in the acknowledgments. It is the author who is responsible for indicating all persons involved in a study.

The Editorial Board has the right to refuse to publish an article because of non-compliance with the editorial requirements.

Authors should write to the editor of any possible conflicts of interest that might be caused by publication of results included in their manuscript. Authors should clearly indicate the sources of all the information cited or presented and should make proper references to the literary sources used in the work, in accordance with the requirements APA standard.The editorial board has the right to refuse to publish the article if the editorial requirements are not met.

Using Generative AI

The use of generative AI and technologies with its help in writing scientific papers is prohibited. Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal Agrology guarantee that they did not use artificial intelligence when writing the manuscript. The use of generative AI is permitted only at the final stage of writing an article to improve wording and eliminate grammatical errors.