The journal is published original works that reflect the results of the studies and resolution of current problems in the field of law and education.
Priority is given to the well-grounded innovative works which are devoted to designing of the principles of informational society in law and education – diversity, minorities, individuality and at this base the formation of informational and consensus democracy, calling to eliminate a system of imposing a will of the majority to the minority and ignoring an individual justice.
The Journal builds its work in compliance with legislation and international treaties of Azerbaijan Republic at the base of generally recognized and specialized ethical norms, including:
- “Statement on Research Integrity (a global guide to responsible conduct of research)” adopted by World Conference on Research Integrity (Singapore, 21-24 July 2010) (http://www.singaporestatement.org)
- Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers/COPE. Available at https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_publishers_Mar11.pdf
- Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors/COPE. 2011. Available at: https://publicationethics.org/files/Code%20of%20Conduct _2.pdf
- Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers/COPE. March 2013. V. 1. 5 p. (Hames I.) Available at: https://publicationethics.org/files/Peer%20review%20 guidelines _0.pdf
- Other guidelines of the Committee on Research Integrity (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines)
Observance of generally recognised and specialized ethical and legal norms is a mandatory for editors, peer reviewers and authors of a journal including:
For Editors
– to promote freedom of expression of opinions; to follow the principles of scientific integrity, objectivity, transparency and independency;
– to have no conflict of interests in respect of reviewing articles; not to malpractice; to exclude commercial interests;
– to be guided by interests of readers, authors, aims and objectives of the journal;
– ensure quality of copy editing and designing of the journal; to maintain the integrity of scientific work;
– to take steps to identify and prevent the publication of articles, which contain plagiarism (compilation) or other violations made during research, and also those previously published; not to protect and not to encourage the breaches found;
– to react urgently on information concerning the violations;
– not to assume subjectivism when articles are reviewed; to assess realistically your competence; to remember that unknown and new might be genius idea;
– to coordinate to authors any retractions or corrections in the text of articles; to assist the authors to eliminate the shortcoming of papers;
– to substantiate a refusal in publication or proposal concerning retraction of paper;
– to observe anonymous of reviewers;
– decision concerning an article is adopted by editorial board for 30 days from the time of receiving with editorial office the manuscript and an author is urgently informed about it;
– editorial board has right to refuse in publication without receiving of peer-reviews if plagiarism, compilations or re-publication facts found;
– editorial board provide information an author about the date of first receiving of paper if disputes of authorship are occurred;
– in case of unreasonable refusal in publication the editorial board apologies to an author; eliminates the found editorial and typographic errors.
– quarantee consideration of all submitted materials; guarantee the Editors’ independence and integrity in decision-making without any prejudice towards authors because of national or religious background or position, regardless of commercial interests and relations with Journal publishers and owners and basing on respect for authors’ personal rights and intellectual property right;
– implement Journal’s policy to ensure and maintain a high standard in the scholarly literature the Editorial ensure that all published papers make a substantial new contribution to the field; strive to ensure the quality of the material published and maintain the integrity of the published record; strive to satisfy readers’ and authors’ needs;
– timeliness, importance, clarity, reliability and soundness of published material are set as guiding principles of editorial activity;
– main principles of published materials’ high quality are as follows:
- soundness: the research being reported should have been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner and follow all relevant legislation; Authors should take collective responsibility for their work and for the content of their publications;
- honesty: researchers should present their results honestly and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation;
- unambiguousness: publications should provide sufficient detail to permit experiments to be repeated by other researchers;
- completeness of presented materials: reports of research should be complete. They should not omit inconvenient, inconsistent or inexplicable findings or results that do not support the authors’ or sponsors’ hypothesis or interpretation;
- balance: new findings should be presented in the context of previous research;
- originality: authors should adhere to publication requirements that submitted work is original and has not been published elsewhere in any language. Work should not be submitted concurrently to more than one publication;
- transparency: all sources of research funding, including direct and indirect financial support, supply of equipment or materials, and other support (such as specialist statistical or writing assistance) should be disclosed.
– implement Journal’s policy to identify suitably qualified editorial board members who can actively contribute to the development and good management of the journal;
– implement Journal’s policy of constant improvement of review institutions, editorial process and materials’ expert review that ensures that peer review is fair, unbiased and timely;
– ensure that readers are informed about who has funded research or other scholarly work;
– ensure adherence of published materials; screen for plagiarism, duplicate or redundant publication by using anti-plagiarism software, or for image manipulation;
– make the final decision on acceptance or non-acceptance of a paper to be published basing on all comments of peer reviewers. The final editorial decision and reasons for this are communicated to authors.
For Reviewers
All papers accepted by editorial office to consideration are subjected to anonymous review by three reviewers of appropriate qualification.
Reviewers are not informed an author’s name, the author does not know the reviewers.
Reviews note a relevance and novelty of selected topic, comprehensiveness of an issue, correctness of usage of the evidences (arguments), system nature of survey of literature and scholarly apparatus, citation index of reviewed work, presence of substantiated conclusions, shortcomings, and reviewer’s conclusions.
The paper is rejected if there are three negative reviews concerning the scientific value of the work or when one of the reviewers has been found a fact of plagiarism or compilation.
Author has right to be familiarized with all negative reviewers and submit an appeal, which will be examined for 10 days by three new reviewers.
Appeal review is produced anonymously for all parties.
Reviewers should be objective, fulfill their work in established time, to promote free expression of ideas; to follow the principles of scientific integrity, constructiveness, correctness and independency; to have no conflict of interests in respect of examined papers, authors or sponsors; not to malpractice; to exclude personal interests; to evaluate realistically their experience, knowledge and competency and not to go beyond its bounds; to remember that unknown them might be genius idea.
Reviewers are required to observe confidentiality of the reviews and not to allow using information received in other purposes.
When plagiarism, compilations, false results, breach of the norms of scientific research are found a reviewer points out that in his conclusion.
Review should be legible, classified and substantiated.
Editors guarantee independent peer review conducted the way that ensures honesty and objectivity of comment on scientific value of the paper considered for publication.
According to the Journal’s policy Editors set peer review process of materials submitted for publication.
Editors ensure fair and proper process of peer review.
Editors may reject a paper without peer review when it is deemed unsuitable for the journal’s readers or is of poor quality. This decision should be made in a fair and unbiased way. The decision should only be based on the Journal’s editorial policy.
Editors use appropriate peer reviewers for papers that are considered for publication by selecting people with sufficient expertise and avoiding those with conflicts of interest
Peer reviewers are told what is expected of them and informed about any changes in editorial policies.
If serious concerns are raised by reviewers about the validity or reporting of academic work, editors allow authors to respond to the concerns.
Editors protect the confidentiality of authors’ material and remind reviewers to do so as well. Editors should not give any indication of a paper’s status with the journal to anyone other than the authors.
Editors protect reviewers’ identities.
Editors are in a powerful position by making decisions on publications, which makes it very important that this process is as fair and unbiased as possible, and is in accordance with the academic vision of the particular journal.
All editorial processes are described in Information for authors; requirements for authors, types of materials to be published and how papers are handled by the journal.
When genuine errors in published work are pointed out by readers, authors, or editors, which do not render the work invalid, a correction (or erratum) should be published as soon as possible. The online version of the paper may be corrected with a date of correction and a link to the printed erratum. If the error renders the work or substantial parts of it invalid, the paper should be retracted with an explanation as to the reason for retraction (e.g., honest error).
In the end of peer review process Editors take relevant measures with proper comment explaining results of the review.
Editors must respond to all allegations or suspicions of research or publication misconduct raised by readers, reviewers, or other editors.
Editors must provide authors with list of requirements. Guidelines are to be updated on regular basis. Editors work in accordance to the system of ensuring identity.
Retracted papers are retained online, and they are prominently marked as a retraction in all online versions. Editors receive information on problems arose and makes decision on paper’s acceptance for publication or its non-acceptance. The final editorial decision and reasons for this should be clearly communicated to authors and reviewers.
Editorial conflicts of interests should be declared, ideally publicly. Editors should not be involved in decisions about papers in which they have a conflict of interest.
For Authors
An author bears responsibility for correctness of mentioned facts, statistic data, names and other data provided, and also for content of the materials, not subjected to open publication.
Submitting a manuscript to editorial office an author makes commitment to publish it neither fully nor partly in other publication; not to present the works that were previously published.
Author presents papers that correspond to ethic and technical requirements (guidelines) of the journal, undertakes not to use plagiarism and compilation, falsification or manipulation with information.
Author provides an opportunity to check the results received through apprehensible stating of problems, methods, conclusions and decisions.
Author is obliged to provide retractions and correct errors, make significant contribution in research, participate in peer-reviewing, respect authorship and observe copyrights, clearly reflect the contributions of co-authors that have been made in common study.
Author must:
– ensure that only those individuals who meet authorship criteria (i.e. made a substantial contribution to the work) are rewarded with authorship and that deserving authors are not omitted;
– author should agree to be listed in the list of authors and should approve the submitted and accepted versions of the publication. Any change to the author list should be approved by all authors including any who have been removed from the list;
– author should be familiar with the presented work and should ensure that publications follow the principles set out in these guidelines;
– author should work with the editor or publisher to correct their work promptly if errors or omissions are discovered after publication;
– author of material have a responsibility to inform the journal promptly if they become aware that the paper submitted, approved for publication or already published requires correcting;
– author is not allowed to copy references from other publications if they have not read the cited work; author should represent the work of others accurately in citations and quotations;
– relevant previous work and publications, both by other researchers and the authors’ own, should be properly acknowledged and referenced. The primary literature should be cited where possible; replication of previous works and their paraphrasing are not allowed: they may be used only as foundation for new conclusions;
– data, text, figures or ideas originated by other researchers should be properly acknowledged and should not be presented as if they were the authors’ own. Original wording taken directly from publications by other researchers should appear in quotation marks with the appropriate citations;
– applicable copyright laws and conventions should be followed. Copyright material (e.g. tables, figures or extensive quotations) should be reproduced only with appropriate owners’ permission and acknowledgement.
The journal provides a platform for free publication of the works of masters and young researchers.
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