Ethics in Publishing
At KKG Publications, we deal with matters concerning ethics in publishing with high priority. We consider the peer-review publication process as an imperative building block of academia, and its integrity should never be compromised in any way; owing to this fact, every article undergoes a peer-review by several experts in the field. To keep up with the ethical standards, we encourage all the authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers to maintain the high standards and care.
The following statement sheds light on the Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors (Committee on Publication Ethics, 2011).
Editors
Editorial Board:
An editorial board is established with experts from the concerned field. This board is responsible for managing the peer-review and publication process.
Equality and Decisions:
One or more editor, editorial board member, chair, or reviewer (internal or external), undertake the evaluation of the relevance of the submitted manuscripts to the journals, technical and scientific merit, originally, and impact. These evaluations need to remain uninfluenced by ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political beliefs, and institutions. Following the peer-review, the Editor-in-Chief has complete authority and holds the responsibility for the published content and the process thereof.
Confidentiality:
Editor(s) and publishing staff are not allowed to disclose manuscripts or their content, directly or indirectly, to anyone except the individuals called for reviewing the manuscript (based on their acceptance of the invitation), other editors of the same publications, and publishing staff.
Conflicts of Interest:
Editor(s) and publishing staff are not allowed to use the contents of submitted manuscripts whether accepted or rejected, for their personal research reasons directly or indirectly without obtaining prior written consent from the concerned authors.
Reviewers
Contribution to Decisions:
For making final decisions pertaining to acceptance or rejection of papers, peer-review is taken as the base. Peer-review involves the reading, understanding, and objective commenting on the submitted papers by the experts in the field. Through peer-review, scholars are able to contribute to the academic and scientific community by helping the editor(s) decide objectively regarding manuscripts.
Promptness:
Reviewers should inform the editor(s) immediately if they don’t have the capacity to serve as a reviewer. Reviewers need to be highly competent for providing their reviews to the editor(s) with high degree of promptness within deadlines.
Confidentiality:
Reviewers must keep the contents of the manuscripts they receive for review highly confidential; whether they decide to review or not, they should not share the content directly or indirectly with anyone except the person who has assigned the review.
Fairness and Objectivity:
Reviewers should give fair and objective reviews for each manuscript, supported by evidence or arguments, uninfluenced by personal feelings or biases.
Thoroughness:
Reviewers should go through each manuscript thoroughly for giving a constructive feedback for manuscript improvement. Reviewers are needed to identify and report technical issues, irregularities, mistakes, missing citations, and similarity to other published work.
Conflicts of Interest:
Invited reviewers should let the editor(s) know of any possible conflict of interest immediately based on competitive, collaborative, personal, family, and other relationships with the authors or people concerned with the submitted work.
Authors
Authorship:
Only persons having contributed significantly to the work and the final manuscript can be put as authors on the paper. These contributions can be the idea/concept, design, experiments, evaluation, analysis, drafting or revision of the manuscript, and others. Authors must be named with consensus before final manuscript submission. If someone has contributed to the study at a smaller scale, they can be addressed in the acknowledgement section of the manuscript.
Accuracy, Originality, and Plagiarism:
Authors should give accurate and complete description of their work and its results. The accuracy and detail should enable reader to replicate the work self-reliantly. Inaccurate, incomplete, fraudulent, and misleading statements are regarded as unacceptable and unethical. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited; use other works with proper citations. Previous works having any influence on the current work should also be cited.
Data and Material:
Authors can share their data, software, or other sharable material online, provided copyright and ownership laws surrounding that particular project permit. Authors should also be willing to share such material with the journal, editor(s), and/or reviewers if asked.
Dual Submissions:
Submission to multiple venues (conference, journal, etc.) simultaneously is prohibited. Showing a previously published work as a new work, without any unique interpretation or analysis, is also not allowed.
Conflicts of Interest:
Authors should let the editor(s) know of any conflict of interest at the time of submission. All the factors outside the scope of the research influencing the work and manuscript writing in any way should be reported. These factors can be funding, grants, advisory, consultancy, stock ownership, current or past employment, and memberships, etc. All funding sources need to be mentioned in the manuscript.
Animal and Human Subjects:
Works involving human and/or animal subjects should observe strict adherence to the institutional guidelines, and should be pre-approved by the required bodies. Moreover, participants should be willing to participate, and they should be assured of their privacy. All these facts should be articulated in the manuscript.
Hazardous Material:
Involvement of any hazardous chemicals and material, or devices that can be harmful, should be clearly mentioned in the manuscript.
Reporting of Mistakes, Errata, and Retractions:
If an author finds out a serious error in a published paper, he/she must point out the publisher immediately. Regardless of whether authors of the work or other readers report a significant error, authors should take the corrective actions by all means. It is decided on a case-by-case basis regarding the submission of the erratum for notifying the future readers of the error and correction, or retraction of the paper. Unethical/plagiarism issues usually end in retraction, while unintentional mistakes usually call for the publication of an erratum.
Publisher
Errata and Retractions:
The publisher is responsible for preventing mistakes, academic and scientific misconduct, and unethical behavior, both intended and unintended, by all means. When mistakes are reported, the publisher collaborates with editor(s) and authors for sending out an erratum addressing the issue. In case of severe and significant mistakes, the paper might be retracted. If unethical behavior, plagiarism, academic and scientific misconduct, or other such activities are found to have been done by the author or authors, the publisher calls for paper retraction.
Content and Archiving:
The publisher maintains all the content digitally on their servers.
Copyright and Access:
These journals are all based on the open-access model, which means interested individuals and institutions can have free access to the materials.
Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in these journals without any prior consent from the publisher or the author. This is set forth by the BOAI definition of open access.
Ownership and Management:
These journals are managed and operated by the KKG Publications.
Schedule
These journals are published based on the continuous model, meaning papers are published online right after their acceptance to the journal throughout the year.