IJCoL adheres to the ethical guidelines for journal publications put forth by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which can be accessed on the COPE website.

Research Integrity

Research in scientific and multidisciplinary domains is a very complex human activity. The publication of its achievements implies a corresponding complexity that imposes to all involved stakeholders (authors, reviewers, journal governing bodies and publisher) strict rigor and high accuracy.

IJCoL is committed to upholding the highest standards of integrity and objectivity in all aspects of editorial work. In particular, IJCoL will ensure that published research and peer-review processes are conducted without bias, conflicts of interest, or unethical influence, thus strictly adhering to the integrity principles of scientific research. Such integrity principles cover:

• Honesty in all dimensions of the research activities;
• Thoroughness, accuracy and excellence in research practice;
• Care and respect for research subjects as well as for all research participants;
• Transparency, completely open communication;
• Accountability for one’s own research integrity as well as for that of others when behavior does not meet the Journal standards.

In addition to the general principles above, IJCoL governing bodies provide specific guidelines and policies for authors on research integrity and ethics, which have been specialized to meet the specific needs and focus of the journal.

Anyone who believes that research published by IJCoL has not been carried out in line with these academic research publishing ethics guidelines, or the above principles, should raise their concern with the Editors in Chief or email ijcoledo@gmail.com. Concerns will be promptly and fairly addressed by following COPE guidelines.

Editor’s duties

The IJCoL journal has established its editorial policy and discloses its references with the aim of encouraging the adoption of international best practices within the target research community.

IJCol governing bodies, represented by the Editors in Chief together with the Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensure the correctness of the process used to evaluate, accept or reject the articles submitted to the journal. In particular, they monitor the peer reviewing process and strictly preserve anonymity of reviewers in relation to a specific evaluated article.

The Editors in Chief are in charge of the final decision to publish the articles submitted to the journal: in their decisions, they comply with the journal’s editorial policies and applicable legal provisions on defamation, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

The journal may use plagiarism detection software to screen the submissions. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed (see below). Editorial decisions will be based on the manuscript’s scientific quality, significance, and relevance to the journal’s scope. Decisions on acceptance, revision, or rejection will be made impartially, without distinction of race, sex, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, as well as scientific, academic or political orientation of the authors.

Members of IJCoL governing bodies shall not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript except to the authors themselves or to those who have been previously authorized.

Unpublished material contained in manuscripts submitted to the journal may not be used by members of the various boards for their own research without the written consent of the author.

Reviewer’s duties

Content published in IJCoL is peer reviewed: peer review is critical to maintaining the standards of IJCoL publications.

The peer-review process will be fair, impartial, and confidential. It will be carried out objectively and according to a rigorous system of scientific principles, clearly and uncontroversially linked to the intellectual and methodological traditions established by international research in the domains covered by the journal.

Reviewers will evaluate manuscripts objectively, based on the quality of research, originality, and significance, and are required to provide adequate reasons for the expressed judgments: they will assist IJCoL committees in making final decisions about a manuscript and, through the communications they convey, can help authors improving it.

If the reviewers do not feel adequate to the proposed task or know that they cannot read the work in the required timeframe, they must communicate this promptly.
Before agreeing to review a manuscript, reviewers must promptly disclose potential conflicts of interest, due to previous collaborative or competitive relationships with the authors and/or their institution.

Articles are submitted for evaluation to two or more reviewers and their acceptance is subject to the implementation of requested revisions, if any, and the final opinion of the Editors in Chief.

Reviewers are encouraged to be alert to redundant publication and plagiarism. They should identify relevant published work that has not been explicitly cited by the authors. Moreover, reviewers are asked to comment on ethical questions and possible research misconduct raised by the assigned manuscript (e.g., unethical research design, insufficient detail on protection of research subjects).

Any paper assigned for reading must be considered strictly confidential; therefore, conveyed contents must not be discussed in any way with other people and may not be used for any other purpose, unless the written consent of the author has been given.

Author’s duties

Authors must guarantee that the manuscript submitted to the journal is original and has not been previously published elsewhere. Manuscripts under evaluation should not be submitted in any form, identical or significantly overlapping with those submitted to IJCol, to other journals for publication.

Authors must guarantee the truthfulness of the data presented in the paper and the objectivity of their own interpretations and that there are no conflicts of interest that could have influenced the results obtained or the interpretations proposed.

Authors should indicate the funding bodies, if any, of the research and/or project from which the article originates.

Authors must comply with copyright and licensing requirements for all materials used in their work. They shall properly acknowledge the sources of the reported work and obtain the necessary permits to the publication of images, tables, or other content already published in accordance with Italian copyright law. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.

Authors are required to duly cite all the texts used, avoiding any form of plagiarism. If the work and/or words of other authors are used, they must be appropriately paraphrased or literally quoted. The authorship of the work must be correctly attributed and all those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, organisation, realisation and re-elaboration of the research on which the article is based must be indicated as co-authors. All authors who have seen and approved the final version of the article and have agreed to its submission for publication, should have their names included in the paper. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors.

Authors are also invited to specify their affiliation and ORCID, if any. All data have to be represented precisely and in detail in order to guarantee the replicability of experiments and results.

If the author becomes aware of any serious error in the publication, s/he shall immediately notify the Editors in Chief of the journal and provide appropriate retractions or corrections of mistakes, also sending the errata.

If the article is accepted, the authors grant the journal the right to publish it by releasing it under the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 International “Attribution – Non-commercial – No Derivative Works” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.

Plagiarism policy

IJCoL does not tolerate plagiarism in any of its publications, and reserves the right to check received submissions through appropriate plagiarism checking tools. Plagiarism can occur in respect to different types of sources and media and can concern both published and unpublished material, including lectures, presentations and grey literature.

In dealing with plagiarism, IJCoL will follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)’s guidelines presented in the following flowcharts:

• Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript
• Suspected plagiarism in a published manuscript

For other plagiarism issues and scientific misconduct, IJCoL applies the COPE Guidance on Plagiarism Cases. We expect IJCoL readers, reviewers and board members to raise any suspicions of plagiarism or copyright infringement either by contacting the Editors in Chief or by emailing ijcoledo@gmail.com. In case of clear plagiarism and illegality cases, the article will be rejected or removed from all mirrored IJCoL websites with full explanation.

Research ethics

If the published research involves any ethical dimension, such as the involvement of human subjects, the treatment of people information or the testing in in vivo conditions of social or personality-related phenomena, the authors are strictly requested to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) – and with the current national and international laws – and to declare any potential conflict of interest. Authors must obtain informed consent from individuals whose personal information is used in their research.

If the published research involves animals, the authors should also submit a statement of compliance with the Italian and international laws and regulations regarding the protection of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes.

The authors, in conducting their research and presenting the results, are requested to act with transparency and autonomy guaranteeing all the possible forms of respect for the individuals involved with the research and in the interest of the participants and their privacy, the colleagues, their respective institutions and the scientific community.

Use of AI Tools

IJCoL does not allow artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or large language models (LLMs) to be listed as authors of publications. The emerging consensus of scholarly organizations, including the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), is that AI tools do not meet the requirements for authorship since they cannot assume ethical and legal responsibility for their work.

IJCoL authors who use AI tools to produce text or images/graphics, or to collect/analyse data, must be transparent about this in their manuscripts by disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper which tool was used and how it was used, so that readers can understand the role of these tools in the development of the reported work. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, including those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any ethical breaches that may result from the use of such content.

Open Access and Article Processing Charge

IJCol is a fully open access journal which guarantees free access to all published contents. No publication fee (Article Processing Charge, APC) is charged to the Authors of articles published by IJCoL.

Archiving

The preservation of content, in the event a journal is no longer published, will be guaranteed via archiving in relevant repositories for the journal topics and focus.