Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
The ethical policy of Iranian Journal of Forests and Rangelands Protection Research, is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and complies with International Committee of journal Editorial Board codes of conduct. Readers, authors, reviewers and editors should follow these ethical policies once working with journal. The ethical policy of journal is liable to determine which of the typical research papers or articles submitted to the journal should be published in the concerned issue. The publishing decision is based on the suggestion of the journal's reviewers and editorial board members. The ethical policy insisted the Editor-in-Chief, may confer with other editors or reviewers in making the decision. The reviewers are necessary to evaluate the research papers based on the submitted content in confidential manner. The reviewers also suggest the authors to improve the quality of research paper by their reviewing comments. Authors should ensure that their submitted research work is original and has not been published elsewhere in any language. Applicable copyright laws should be followed by the authors. Any kind of plagiarism constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. For information on this matter in publishing and ethical guidelines please visit http://publicationethics.org.
Publisher responsibilities
Editorial responsibilities
Reviewers’ responsibilities
Authors’ responsibilities
Authorship Criteria
To ensure authorship for the submitted manuscripts, the contributors should meet the following three conditions:
Authorship and Author’s Responsibility
Possible Misconducts
Data fabrication and falsification 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.
Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions.
Excessive citations in a submitted manuscript that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and were included solely to increase citations to a given author's work or articles published in a particular journal are referred to as citation manipulation. This is a form of scientific misconduct since it misrepresents the importance of the specific work and publication in which it appears.
Simultaneous submission occurs when a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal when it is already under consideration by another journal.
Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.
All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.
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 Iranian Journal of Forests and Rangelands Protection Research as plagiarism. All manuscripts under review or published with Iranian Journal of Forests and Rangelands Protection Research are subject to screening using plagiarism prevention software. Thus, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. The authors are expected to check their manuscript for plagiarism before submission.
If plagiarism is detected during peer review, the submission can be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication we reserve the right, as necessary, to issue a correction or retract the article. We reserve the right to notify the institutions of authors about the plagiarism that was found before or after publication.
The Principles of Transparency
Good research should be well justified, well planned, appropriately designed, and ethically approved. To conduct research to a lower standard may constitute misconduct. The authors are responsible for the whole scientific content as well as the accuracy of the bibliographic information (https://creativecommons.org/choose/).
Data should be appropriately analyzed, but inappropriate analysis does not necessarily amount to misconduct. Fabrication and falsification of data do constitute misconduct.
Conflicts of interest comprise those which may not be fully apparent and which may influence the judgment of author, reviewers, and editors. They have been described as those which, when revealed later, would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived. They may be personal, commercial, political, academic or financial. “Financial” interests may include employment, research funding, stock or share ownership, payment for lectures or travel, consultancies and company support for staff.
This journal uses Double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. Authors have the right to communicate to the editor if they do not wish their manuscript to be reviewed by a particular reviewer because of potential conflicts of interest. No article is rejected unless negative comments are received from at least two reviewers. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site (Peer review process journal page link).
Iranian Journal of Forests and Rangelands Protection Research is published 2 issues per year. All the content from the beginning to the end will be available for ever on Iranian Journal of Forests and Rangelands Protection Research website.
All manuscripts must be reviewed with the utmost regard for the authors' confidentiality. Authors entrust editors with the results of their scientific work and creative effort when they submit manuscripts for review, and their reputation and career may be at stake. Disclosure of confidential details during the review of an author's manuscript may be a violation of their rights. Reviewers have the right to confidentiality, which the editor must respect. If there is a suspicion of dishonesty or fraud, confidentiality may have to be breached, but it must be honored otherwise. Besides the authors and reviewers, editors are prohibited from disclosing information about manuscripts (including their receipt, content, status in the reviewing process, reviewer criticism, or ultimate fate). Requests to use the materials in legal proceedings are included in this category.
Editors must clarify to reviewers that manuscripts sent for review are privileged communications and the authors' private property. As a result, reviewers and editorial staff must respect the authors' rights by refraining from publicly discussing or appropriating the authors' work before the manuscript is published. Reviewers should not be allowed to make copies of the manuscript for their files, and they should not be allowed to share it with others except if the editor permits them. After submitting reviews, reviewers should return or destroy copies of the manuscripts. Editors should not keep copies of manuscripts that have been rejected. Without the permission of the reviewer, author, and editor, reviewer comments should not be published or otherwise made public.
On the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge, this journal provides immediate open access to its content.
Authors have the right to:
*Personal use rights
Authors can use their articles for scholarly purposes in whole or in part, such as:
The policy of the journal is not to have advertising.
To maintain the integrity of academic record, journal may have to publish correction or retraction of paper published in journal. According to agreed academic community norms, corrections or corrections of published articles are made by publishing an Erratum or Retraction article, without altering the original article in any other way than by adding a prominent connection to the Erratum / Retraction article. The original article remains in the public domain and should be commonly indexed to the subsequent Erratum or Retraction. We may have to delete the material from our website and archive sites in the exceptional event the material is considered to infringe those rights or is defamatory. It may be necessary for the original author(s) to make minor corrections to published articles by making a comment on the published Article. It will only be acceptable if the modifications do not affect the article's results or conclusions.
Changes to published articles that affect the article's meaning and conclusion but do not invalidate the article in its entirety may be corrected, at the discretion of the editor(s), by publishing an Erratum indexed and linked to the original article. Changes in authorship of published articles are corrected through an Erratum.
If the scientific information in an article is significantly compromised on rare occasions it may be appropriate to retract published articles. In these cases, Journal must comply with the COPE guidelines. Retracted papers are indexed and the original article is referred to.
Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct
Editor-in-Chief takes reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others.