This journal is a member of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and we are committed to complying with its principles

 

Journal's Membership link

The ethical policy of JPP is based on COPE's guidelines. Editorial Board, reviewers and authors are encouraged to study these guidelines. It is obvious that any plagiarism, data fabrication, inappropriate authorship credit or any unethical behavior will lead to removal the manuscript from the review process.  This policy has been prepared to determine the duties and obligations of the authors, executive in chief, editorial board and reviewers.

 

Duties and Responsibilities of the JPP’s Editors

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf)

1. The Editors should evaluate the content of submitted manuscripts whether are in the scope of the journal or not and also should recommend expert reviewers based on their integrated recognition of specialized reviewers.
2. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for making the decision to accept or reject the submitted manuscripts to the journal, considering the judgment of editorial board’s members, based on the validation of the work in question, its importance to researchers and readers, the reviewers’ comments, and such legal requirements as are currently in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism with other editors and reviewers.
3. The Editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers and authors.
4. The Editors should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest. In such circumstance, they will ask another member of the editorial board to handle the manuscript.
5. The Editors, especially the Editor-in-Chief should be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent data issues. Editors will take responsive measures when ethical concerns are raised with regard to a submitted manuscript or published paper. Every reported act of unethical publishing behavior will be looked into, even if it is discovered years after publication.
6. The Editor-in-Chief follows the COPE Flowcharts when dealing with cases of suspected misconduct. If, on investigation, the ethical concern is well-founded, a correction, retraction, expression of concern or other note as may be relevant will be published in the journal.
7. The Editors must not disclose any information about submitted manuscripts to anyone as appropriate until they are published.
8. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the Editor-in-Chief or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.
9. Editors should give fair consideration to all manuscripts offered for publication, judging each on its merits without regard to country, race, religion, nationality, sex, seniority, or institutional affiliation of the author(s). Decisions to edit and publish are not determined by the policies of governments or any other agencies outside of this journal.
10. The Editor-in-Chief has full authority over the entire editorial content of the journal and the timing of publication of that content. 

Duties and Responsibilities of the JPP’s Reviewers

(http://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Peer%20review%20guidelines.pdf)

1. The Reviewers should provide comments that helping editors to make decision on the submitted manuscript to be published or not.
2. The Reviewers should maintain the confidentiality of manuscripts, which they are invited to review.
3. The Reviewers should not review the manuscripts in which they have found conflicts of interest with any of the authors, companies, or institutions. They should immediately notify the Editor-in-Chief to declare their conflicts of interest and decline the invitation to review, so that alternative reviewers can be invited.
4. The Reviewers who feel that is not qualified to review the assigned manuscript or unable to provide a prompt review, should notify the Editor-in-Chief and excuse themselves from the review process. If they know any other expert reviewer(s) they may suggest them to the Editor-in-Chief via dedicated email/comments section in the Reviewer Dashboard.
5. The Reviewers should not discuss the manuscript with anyone other than the Editor-in-Chief, nor discuss any information from the manuscript without permission. This applies also to the invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.
6. The Reviewers are bound to treat the manuscript received for peer reviewing as confidential, and must not use the information obtained through peer review for personal advantage. 
7. The Reviewers comments against invited manuscripts should be technical, professional and objective.
8. The Reviewers should avoid personal biases in their comments and judgments and they should express their views clearly with supporting arguments which assist the author in improving the manuscript.
9. Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that had been previously reported elsewhere should be accompanied by the relevant citation.
10. The reviewers should also call to the Editor-in-Chief's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other publications of which they have personal knowledge.

Duties and Responsibilities of the JPP’s Authors

(http://publicationethics.org/files/International%20standards_authors_for%20website_11_Nov_2011.pdf)

1. Manuscripts must be submitted with the understanding that they have not been published elsewhere (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis) and are not currently under consideration by another journal.
2. Authors are requested to submit manuscripts with sufficient details and references to permit others to replicate the work.
3. Authors maybe asked to provide the original data of their study for editorial review and should be prepared to make the data publicly available if practicable.
4. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the manuscript has been approved by all coauthors.
5. Only those who meet authorship criteria should be listed as authors in the manuscript as they must be able to take public responsibility for the content.
6. All authors must read the Article submission checklist before being submitted.
7. Authors should at the earliest stage disclose any conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or their interpretation in the manuscript (by uploading the Conflicts of Interest Form along with the manuscript submission).
8. The authors must ensure that the submitted manuscript describes completely the original work and free from any aspect of plagiarism. All authors are suggested to use plagiarism prevention software for similarity check.
9. Authors must clearly identify in their manuscript, if their work involves chemicals, procedures or equipment that have any unusual hazards inherent.
10. If needed, Authors should state in their manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human participants and the privacy rights of human participants have been observed.
11. In the case of "Need Revision" decision, authors should respond to the reviewers’ comments systematically, point by point, and in a timely manner and, revise and re-submit their manuscript to the journal by the deadline given.
12. Authors are requested to clearly identify who financially supported the research and/or preparation of the manuscript and briefly describe the role of the founder/ sponsor in any part of the work at the end of their manuscript under “Acknowledgements” section.
13. It is a condition for submission of a manuscript that the authors permit editing of the paper for readability.
14. All authors agree to allow the corresponding author to serve as the correspondent with the Journal’s editorial office, to review the edited manuscript and proof.
15. Under open access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content, but allow anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly.
16. When author(s) discover(s) a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the Journal editor or publisher to retract or correct the manuscript. 
17. All authors must know that the submitted manuscripts under review with the JPP are subject to screening, using Plagiarism Prevention Software. Plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics and in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

Duties and Responsibilities of the JPP’s Publisher

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Code%20of%20conduct%20for%20publishers%20FINAL_1_0.pdf)

1. "Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM)" is promising to ensure that the decision on manuscript submissions is only made based on professional judgment and will not be affected by any commercial interests.
2. FUM is committed to maintain the integrity of academic and research records.
3. FUM is monitoring the ethics by Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers.
4. FUM, together with the Journal’s editors, shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of manuscripts where research misconduct has occurred, and under no circumstances encourage such misconduct or knowingly allow taking place.
5. FUM is always checking the plagiarism and fraudulent data issues involving in the submitted manuscripts and willing to publish corrections, clarifications and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.
6. FUM Business Model: FUM as the publisher supports the Journal for each published issue by paying a defined budget according to its published annual rank in the Portal of Scientific Journals of Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology for costs including those pertaining to setup and maintenance of the publication infrastructure, routine operation of the Journal, processing of manuscripts through peer-reviews, editing, publishing, maintaining the scholarly record, and archiving.

FUM Policy on Using AI and LLMs

In compliance with the position taken by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (link), in all FUM Press publications, including academic papers, authors may use AI and LLMs tools to prepare initial drafts “in the Materials and Methods (or similar section)” of their manuscript. They may do so transparently, and only if they maintain full accountability and responsibility for the content of their work. Since these tools cannot take responsibility for submitted manuscripts, “AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship” at this stage. FUM Press remains strictly committed to the long-established academic standards regarding authorship, plagiarism, transparency, and accountability; authors are thus required to properly document and state their use of AI or LLMs.

Violation of Publication Ethics

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Sharing%20_of_Information_Among_EiCs_guidelines_web_version.pdf)

The Editorial board of the JPP acknowledges that plagiarism is unacceptable in any of its forms:

1. Plagiarism: Plagiarism is intentionally using someone else’s ideas or other original material as if they are one's own. Copying even one sentence from someone else’s manuscript, or even one of your own that has previously been published, without proper citation is considered by the JPP as plagiarism. All manuscripts under review or published with JPP are subject to screening using plagiarism prevention software (e.g. iThenticate). Thus, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics.
2. Simultaneous Submission: Care should be taken to ensure that the work has not been published elsewhere, in any language and is not simultaneously submitted to other journals.
3. Duplicate Publication: Duplicate publication occurs when two or more articles, without full cross referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions.
4. Redundant Publications: Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.
5. Data Fabrication: Data fabrication means the researcher did not really carry out the study, but made up data or results and had recorded or reported the fabricated information. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but manipulated, changed, or omitted data or results from the research findings.
6. Citation Manipulation: Citation Manipulation implies excessive citations in the submitted manuscript that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and have been included solely for the purpose of increasing citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal. This leads to misrepresenting the importance of the specific work and journal in which it appears and is thus a form of scientific misconduct.
7. 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. Do not forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

Handling Misconduct Cases

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Sharing%20_of_Information_Among_EiCs_guidelines_web_version.pdf)

The Editorial board of the Journal of Iranian Plant Protection Research takes the necessary measures to examine the incoming papers on their originality, reliability of contained information and correct use of citations.

If any of the unethical publishing behavior is detected by the Journal Editorial board or by one of the reviewers, the first action is to inform the Editor-in-chief by supplying copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner.

If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the Committee on Publication Ethics, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the JPP publication policies; if the manuscript has been published, the Editor may request the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.

If the author’s explanation is unacceptable and it seems that serious unethical conduct has taken place, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee via Editorial board. After deliberation, the Committee will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions. 

Sanctions: In extreme cases, notifications will be sent to the affiliations of the authors and the authors are prohibited from submitting their work to JPP for 5 years.

Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections

This journal allows debate post publication on journal’s site, through "Send comment about this article" section to the editor up to one month before final publication. Our mechanisms for correcting, revising or retracting articles after publication depends on the content of the received comment and if the sent comments are useful and applicable for readers/authors, they will be showed under reference section of the articles pages.

Complaint Policy

If the authors disagree with the editorial decision on their manuscripts, they have a right to appeal. Authors who wish to appeal an editorial decision should contact the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Iranian Plant Protection Research. In such cases the Editor-in-Chief will review the manuscript, the editorial and peer reviewers' comments and gives his/her decision for accepting or rejecting a manuscript. Editor-in-Chief may, if so required, send the manuscript to a new handling editor for a fresh editorial review and to new reviewer for further peer reviewing. In such case, the final decision maker will be the Editorial board of the journal.

How to Make a Complaint

The procedure to make a complaint is quite simple. The complaint can be made by writing an e-mail to: jpp1@um.ac.ir

All complaints will be acknowledged within three working days.