Publication Ethics

The journal Akadēmiskā Dzīve (Academic Life)  is committed to ensuring high quality of the articles. The editors, reviewers and authors of the manuscripts are expected to comply with the publishing ethics outlined in the COPE code of practice (www.publicationethics.org).

In case of any form of malpractice, the editor-in-chief accept the information provided in the flowcharts published by the Committee on Publication Ethics on their website https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts.

Responsibilities of the Editor

The editor is responsible for maintaining ethical standards and high scientific quality of the papers admitted for publication in the journal. 

The editor evaluates the manuscripts before sending them to reviewers. The papers which do not correspond to the aims and scope of the journal are already rejected at this stage. The papers which need substantial changes for language and formatting may be rejected as well.

On the bases of the received double-blind peer reviews, the editor together with the editorial board members takes the final decision whether to accept or reject a paper. 

The editor ensures that the reviewers are selected according to their expertise.

In case of being informed about the research misconduct (e.g. plagiarism, citation manipulation, data falsification or fabrication), the editor or the publisher will deal with it according to the COPE’s guidelines in dealing with allegations. The editor and the publisher will ensure that corrections or apologies are published when needed.

Responsibilities of the Reviewer

The reviewer assists the editor in decision making about the inclusion of the article in the journal as well as may assist the authors in improving the article.

The reviewer should treat a manuscript as confidential proprietary information and does not use it in any way or disclose it to any third party, except for the editors.

The reviewer is asked to evaluate:

• the originality of the manuscript and its international significance
• the selection and analysis of the theories and the appropriate citing of the sources
• the choice and application of research methods
• the analysis of the results and relevant conclusions
• language use and formatting of the paper. 

The reviewer provides the author with constructive feedback which allows to improve their manuscript.

The reviewer is obliged to identify potential plagiarism and inform the editor about such cases.

The reviewer provides an objective analysis of the paper and formulates recommendations to the author(s) how to improve the quality of the paper.

The reviewer should notify the editor about any unexpected delay of the review process.

The reviewer should inform the editor about the conflict of interest prior to the reviewing process.

Responsibilities of Authors

Authors should ensure that the manuscript does not contain any material published previously (except for an abstract or thesis) or is under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Authors are responsible for ensuring a high quality of their manuscripts to meet standards of scholarly research. Authors should present the study in an objective and accurate manner.

The corresponding author is responsible to ensure that the co-authors have provided significant contribution to the preparation of the manuscript. No uninvolved individual shall be listed among the co-authors of the manuscript.

Before submission of the article, the corresponding author ensures that it is well-structured, easily readable, proofread and formatted according to the Manuscript guidelines. Abstracts, titles and keywords and authors’ affiliations must be written in English; authors and references – in Roman script. Tables and figures are not just copied and pasted from Excel, but well configured within the content of an article. Language and formatting editors might provide recommendations how to improve only minor shortcomings. In case of the need for substantial changes for language and formatting, the referees may reject the manuscript. Although the editors prefer that papers are written in British English, they could be written in US English, but not a mixture of different variants of English.

Authors ensure that there is no evidence of plagiarism in the submitted manuscript, for example, plagiarism based on uncredited translation, uncredited references to someone else's unpublished work, or ideas borrowed from others. Authors should also acknowledge anyone who has contributed to the article. Authors have credited their advisors and other authors and documented their data with verifiable source references. 

Authors should consider the inclusion in the article any image (figure, table, etc.) which is protected by copyright. Authors are obliged to clear all necessary permissions to reproduce any kind of third-party material (figures, tables, texts, etc.) which is treated as a separate copyright item. Copies of each permission should be provided to the editor. Only if authors make substantial changes to it, it might not need any permission.

Authors should avoid web links to images or other material which might break down over a period of time or direct readers to a site that is breaching copyright.

All sources of financial support should be disclosed in the Acknowledgements section.

Authors are expected to report any errors that could not have been verified by reviewers and/or editors to the editor. The corresponding author is responsible for providing corrections of mistakes in case of detection them.

The corresponding author must ensure that all co-authors approve the final manuscript and agree to its submission for publication in an open-access journal. All authors agree that articles are available in open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Based on
Committee on Publication Ethics (2023) Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.
Available at http://publicationethics.org/resources/code-conduct.