Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

1. Authors

• Submit only original work, not published or under review elsewhere
• No concurrent submission or duplicate publication
• Cite and quote others' work properly
• No plagiarism, including self-plagiarism
• No data fabrication, falsification, or image manipulation
• Give enough detail for others to replicate the work
• Limit authorship to significant contributors
• All authors must approve the final version
• No change to the author list after acceptance without written consent of all authors and Program Chair approval
• Disclose all funding sources
• Disclose all conflicts of interest
• Get ethics approval and informed consent for research on humans, animals, or personal data
• Report any significant error found after publication

2. Reviewers

• Keep manuscripts confidential
• Do not use manuscript content for personal work
• Review objectively, with clear reasons
• No personal criticism of authors
• Decline if there is a conflict of interest
• Decline if you lack the expertise or time
• Report substantial similarity with other work to the editors
• Submit reviews by the deadline

3. Editors and Program Committee

• Decide on relevance, originality, significance, clarity, and soundness only
• No bias based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin, nationality, or political views
• Share manuscript information only with the corresponding author, reviewers, editorial advisers, and publisher
• Hand over papers where they have a conflict of interest
• Investigate misconduct allegations using COPE flowcharts
• Do not use unpublished material without the author's written consent

4. Peer Review Process

• Double-blind review
• At least two expert reviewers per paper
• Out-of-scope or poor-quality papers may be rejected before review, with the reason given
• Decisions: accept, minor revision, major revision, reject
• Revised papers are checked against review comments
• Program Chairs' decision is final

5. Plagiarism Screening

• All submissions are checked for similarity
• High similarity is flagged for review, not automatic rejection
• Proven plagiarism leads to rejection
• Authors' institution may be informed

6. Generative AI

• AI tools cannot be authors
• Authors must disclose AI use in writing, analysis, or images
• Authors remain responsible for accuracy and originality
• Reviewers must not upload manuscripts to public AI tools

7. Conflicts of Interest

• Authors, reviewers, and editors must declare financial, personal, academic, or professional conflicts
• Undisclosed conflicts may lead to rejection or withdrawal

8. Misconduct, Corrections and Retractions

Misconduct includes:

• Plagiarism
• Data fabrication or falsification
• Image manipulation
• Duplicate submission
• Authorship fraud
• Review or citation manipulation

• Allegations are investigated confidentially
• Authors can respond before action is taken
• Possible actions: correction, expression of concern, retraction
• Corrections and retractions are published openly