Publication Ethics | The North African Journal of Food and Nutrition Research

Publishing Ethics

The rules presented below were developed on the basis of the recommendations of COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), which were included in the Core Practices.

The NAJFNR editors and assistants are working hard to guarantee the content we publish is ethically sound. Aiming to achieve that goal, we carefully follow the guidelines and flowcharts provided and published by the COPE website.

Ethical standards for publication exist to ensure high-quality scientific publications, public trust in scientific findings, and that people receive credit for their ideas.

NAJFNR is committed to publishing only original material, i.e., material that has neither been published elsewhere, nor is under review elsewhere. Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will incur plagiarism sanctions.

The following guidelines should be followed in line with the journal’s instructions for authors. Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors should consider these ethical policies once working with NAJFNR.

Some key points to consider prior submitting your manuscript:

Any manuscript you submit to the NAJFNR should not have been published prior in its current, or similar, form. Exceptions to this rule are outlined in pre-print and conference papers (see below the Pre-print policy). If any substantial element of your paper has been previously published, you need to declare this to the journal editor upon submission. Please note, the NAJFNR uses Crossref Similarity Check to check on the originality of submissions received. This service compares submissions against a database of 49 million works from 800 scholarly publishers.
Your work should not have been submitted elsewhere and should not be under consideration by any other publication.
If you have a conflict of interest, you must declare it upon submission; this allows the editor to decide how they would like to proceed. Read about conflict of interest here.
By submitting your work to the NAJFNR, you are guaranteeing that the work is not in infringement of any existing copyright.

Preprint policy

Uploading a preprint has become an increasingly common way for researchers in several disciplines to share their research quickly.

When uploading to a preprint server, we would recommend you check that:

The server clearly identifies preprints as non-peer reviewed works.
The server asks authors to disclose all relationships and activities that might bias or be seen to bias their work.
If the server requires you to complete a licence agreement to make a deposit, you fully understand the rights you are giving to the platform, and if any limitations are imposed for the future use of your work.
You have reviewed any copyright or preprint policies at your institution and funder to ensure the preprint deposit is allowed.

The NAJFNR will consider papers for publication that have been posted to a preprint server before they are submitted to our journal.

However, we can only consider papers where no copyright have not been assigned or an exclusive licence signed when posting work to a preprint server.

When submitting a paper to the NAJFNR that has been shared to a preprint server, we ask that authors make it clear to the editor of the journal on submission that the work is already hosted on a preprint server.

Duplicate Submission

Manuscripts that are found to have been published elsewhere, or to be under review elsewhere, will incur duplicate submission/publication sanctions. If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they are required to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions beyond those of the previous work.

Citation Manipulation

Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations whose primary purpose is to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will incur citation manipulation sanctions.

Data Fabrication and Falsification

Submitted manuscripts that are found to have either fabricated or falsified experimental results, including the manipulation of images, will incur data fabrication and falsification sanctions.

Improper Author Contribution or Attribution

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. It is important to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

Redundant Publications

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles.

Sanctions

In the event that there are documented violations of any of the above mentioned policies in any journal, regardless of whether or not the violations occurred in any article published by NAJFNR, the following sanctions will be applied:

Immediate rejection of the infringing manuscript.
Prohibition against all of the authors for any new submissions to NAJFNR, either individually or in combination with other authors of the infringing manuscript, as well as in combination with any other authors. This prohibition will be imposed for a minimum of 36 months.
Prohibition against all of the authors from serving on the Editorial Board NAJFNR.

In cases where the violations of the above policies are found to be particularly egregious, the publisher reserves the right to impose additional sanctions beyond those described above.

About Plagiarism

As defined by the ORI (Office of Research Integrity), plagiarism can include, “theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another’s work”. Plagiarism is the unethical act of copying someone else’s prior ideas, processes, results or words without explicit acknowledgement of the original author and source.

Plagiarism is the use or close imitation of the language and ideas of another author and representation of them as one's own original work. Duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, occurs when an author reuses substantial parts of his or her own published work without providing the appropriate references. This can range from getting an identical paper published in multiple journals, where authors add small amounts of new data to a previous paper.

Plagiarism can be said to have clearly occurred when large chunks of text have been cut and pasted. Such manuscripts would not be considered for publication. But minor plagiarism without dishonest intent is relatively frequent, for example when an author reuses parts of an introduction from an earlier paper. The editors will judge any case of which they become aware (either by their own knowledge of and reading about the literature, or when alerted by referees) on its own merits.

If a case of plagiarism comes to light after a paper is published in NAJFNR, the journal will conduct a preliminary investigation. If plagiarism is found, the journal will contact the author's institute and funding agencies. A determination of misconduct will lead the Journal to run a statement, bidirectionally linked online to and from the original paper, to note the plagiarism and to provide a reference to the plagiarized material. The paper containing the plagiarism will also be obviously marked on each page of the PDF. Depending on the extent of the plagiarism, the paper may also be formally retracted.

The following types of plagiarism are considered by The NAJFNR:

Full Plagiarism: Any text taken from previously published content without any changes to the text, idea and grammar is considered as full plagiarism. It involves presenting exact text from a source as one's own.

Partial Plagiarism: If content constitutes a mixture from multiple different sources, where the author has extensively rephrased text, then it is known as partial plagiarism.

Self-Plagiarism: When an author reutilizes complete or parts of their previously published work, then it is known as self-plagiarism. Complete self-plagiarism is a case when an author republishes their own previously published work in a new journal.

Ethical Standards and Action for Plagiarism:

The NAJFNR respects intellectual property and aims at protecting and promoting original work of its owners. Articles containing plagiarized material are against the standards of quality, research and innovation. Hence, all contributors submitting articles to the NAJFNR are expected to abide ethical standards and abstain from plagiarism, in any form. In case, an author is found to be suspected of plagiarism in a submitted or published article then, the NAJFNR editorial office shall contact the author (s) to submit his / her (their) explanation within two weeks, which may be forwarded to the NAJFNR's Fact-Finding Committee (FFC) constituted for that purpose, to take further course of action. If the NAJFNR editorial office does not receive any response from the concerned author (s) within the stipulated time period, then the Director / Dean / Head of the concerned College, Institution or Organization or the Vice Chancellor of the University to which the author (s) is/are affiliated shall be contacted to take strict action against the concerned author (s).

The NAJFNR shall take serious action against published articles found to contain plagiarism:

- The journal shall completely remove them from Journal website and other third-party websites where the article is abstracted and indexed.

- The journal shall remove the PDF version of the published article from the website and disable all links to full text article. The term plagiarized article shall be appended to the published article title.

- The journal shall disable the author account with the journal and reject all future submissions from the author for a period of 03 / 05 / 10 years or even ban the authors permanently.

- The journal may also display the list of such authors along with their full contact details on the journal website.

- Any other course of action, as recommended by the Committee or as deemed fit for the instant case or as decided by the Editorial Board from time to time.

Conflicts of Interest

The NAJFNR is committed to upholding the highest standards of publication ethics and takes seriously publication malpractice and conflicts of interest. Personal, financial and professional affiliations or relationships can be perceived as conflicts of interest. All authors and all members of NAJFNR’ Editorial Boards are required to disclose any actual and potential conflicts of interest at submission or upon accepting an editorial or review assignment.

The NAJFNR review process is designed to guarantee transparent and objective editorial and review process, and because handling Editor and reviewers' names are made public upon the publication of articles, conflicts of interest will be openly apparent.

As an author, disclosure of any potential conflict of interest should be done during the submission process. Consider the following questions and make sure you disclose any positive answers. If you failed to disclose any of the potential conflict of interest below during submission, please contact the NAJFNR Editorial Office with the details as soon as possible:

Did you or your institution at any time receive payment or services from a third party for any aspect of the submitted work?
Do you have financial relationships with entities that could be perceived to influence, or that give the appearance of potentially influencing, what you wrote in the submitted work?
Do you have any patents and copyrights, whether pending, issued, licensed and/or receiving royalties related to the research?
Do you have other relationships or activities that readers could perceive to have influenced, or that give the appearance of potentially influencing, what you wrote in the submitted work?

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Complaint Policy

The best way to reach us is by email. Complaints should be directly emailed to contact@najfnr.com where they are dealt with confidentiality.

For more details please go to Complaints Policy webpage: (Link)