Scientific Journal for Contemporary Education and Application of Information Technologies – EdTech Journal

Code of Ethics

Members of the editorial board of the scientific journal EdTech Journal supervise the application of ethical standards in scientific research and publication operations and are responsible for upholding the ethics of the journal's publisher, the Institute for Contemporary Education. Surveillance entails thorough supervision of plagiarism and the submission of incorrect information and copyright infringement, clarification, correction, manuscript removal, and other steps.

If the editorial board discovers a violation of ethical principles, i.e. that an already published work contains false information, the manuscript will be revised or removed, and this will be clearly stated in the journal.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, defined as appropriating other people's ideas, words, or other forms of creative expression and presentation and presenting them as one's own, is a severe violation of scientific and publishing ethics. Plagiarism may include copyright violation, which is a crime. Plagiarism covers the following behaviours:

• downloading or almost literal paraphrase (to conceal plagiarism) of parts of other writers' texts without clearly stating the source or labelling the copied fragments (for example, using quotation marks);

• copying formulae, photos, or tables from other people's works without correctly citing the source and without the author's or copyright holders' permission to use them.

We advise authors to examine each manuscript for plagiarism. Manuscripts that clearly show signs of plagiarism will be rejected.

If it is discovered that the paper has already been published in the EdTech Journal, it will be withdrawn following the method outlined under "Withdrawal of papers", and the authors will be barred from publishing in the journal in the future. Authors will also be obliged to send a written apology to the original work's authors.

Retraction of articles

Article withdrawal and removal processes should not be taken lightly and should only be used in rare circumstances. The primary rationale for withdrawing or removing a paper is the necessity to remedy the error in order to maintain scientific integrity, not the desire to punish the authors.

Articles that have been accepted for publication but have not yet been appropriately published are typically withdrawn. For example, suppose an article is discovered to contain errors, false allegations of copyright, to have been submitted to multiple journals at the same time, to be plagiarized, to manipulate data for fraud, to infringe the rights of publishers, copyright holders, or authors, or to represent otherwise a severe violation of the professional code of ethics and guidelines for publication in the EdTech Journal. In that case, such work must be "withdrawn" even before publication.

Published articles will be kept current, accurate, and unaltered for as long as possible. However, there may be circumstances in which an already published article must be removed: if there are subsequent errors that must be corrected, if there is a violation of the legal restrictions of publishers, copyright owners, or authors, or if there is a violation of a professional code of ethics, such as multiple submissions, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraud in the use of data, and so on. Several libraries and scientific bodies have developed standards for removing an article from an online database. Their best practices have been adopted by the EdTech Journal: article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced by a page (HTML and PDF) stating that the article has been withdrawn following the Journal article withdrawal policy, with a link to the current document on that policy.

On the recommendation of the scientific community, the author or the editorial board may withdraw the article, according to good practice. 

Dispute resolution and verification of the presented allegations and evidence

Any individual or institution may report violations of ethical norms and other irregularities to the editors and editorial staff at any time and give the relevant information/evidence.

The procedure for confirming the report and evidence given shall be initiated by the editor-in-chief, in consultation with the editorial board. Any evidence produced during such a procedure will be treated as confidential material and presented only to those directly participating in the procedure.

Authors and reviewers suspected of breaking ethical norms will be allowed to react to allegations levelled against them. If irregularities are discovered, it will be determined whether they constitute a minor infringement or a major violation of ethical standards.

Minor infraction

Minor misdemeanour situations will be settled in direct dialogue with the authors and reviewers who committed the misdemeanour, without the intervention of third parties; for example:

• alerting the author/reviewer of a minor infraction caused by a misunderstanding or misapplication of academic standards;
• a warning letter to the author/reviewer who committed the minor infraction.

A blatant transgression of ethical principles

The editor-in-chief makes decisions on serious violations of ethical standards in collaboration, if needed, with the editorial board, and, if necessary, a panel of specialists assembled for the occasion. 

The following measures may be taken (individually or concurrently):

• writing a statement or editorial describing the case of the ethical infraction;
• sending a formal notice to the authors/reviewers; 
• withdrawal of published work following the procedure outlined in "Withdrawal of works";
• authors will be barred from publishing papers in the journal for an indefinite amount of time or permanently;
• alerting relevant professional organizations or responsible authorities about the case so that necessary action can be taken.

The journal's editorial board is governed in resolving conflicts by the standards and recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Open access

The open-access version of the EdTech Journal is available. Articles published in the journal can be downloaded for free and disseminated for educational and non-commercial purposes from the journal's website. Articles downloaded from the journal's website for free must be used in compliance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Serbia license

Copyright

The authors agree to the following copyright policy by submitting the paper. The authors reserve all rights if the work is not approved for publication in the EdTech Journal. However, when the article is accepted, the authors relinquish certain rights to the publisher.

In summary, the writers grant the publisher the right to publish the article, be listed as the article's first publisher in the event of later use of the piece, and distribute the article in all forms and media. In greater detail, the publisher receives the following non-exclusive rights to the manuscript, including all additional materials and all parts, extracts, or elements of the manuscript:

• the right to reproduce and distribute the manuscript, including the right to print on demand;
• the right to publish manuscript trial copies, reprints, and special editions;
• the right to have the manuscript translated into other languages;
• the right to reproduce the manuscript using photomechanical or similar means, including but not limited to photocopying, and to distribute such reproductions;
• the right to reproduce and distribute the manuscript electronically or optically on any data carrier or storage medium, including hard disk, CD-ROM, DVD and Blu-ray Disc (BD), and in any file format, as well as the right to reproduce and distribute the manuscript from the said data carriers;
• the right to keep the manuscript in databases, including online databases, as well as the right to convey the document in any technical system or manner;
• the right to make the manuscript available to the public or local groups of users on an individual basis, for use on monitors or other readers (including e-book readers), as well as in a form that allows the user to print, via the Internet, other online services, or an internal or external network.

The authors have the same rights as third parties to use the article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Serbia license. The authors, however, retain the following copyrights over the published article: the right to translate the article into another language, to use it in compilations of their works, to use it in a doctoral dissertation or monograph, for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, provided they state that the new work is a derivative of the article published in the EdTech Journal and provide the DOI of the published article in the form of an HTML link, and/or the URL location where the article was published.

Policy on privacy

The names and e-mail addresses entered on the journal's website will be used solely for the purposes of this journal and will not be made available to any third party for any other reason.

Disclaimer

The views represented in the published works do not represent the views of the journal's editors office and editorial board. The authors accept legal and moral responsibility for the ideas presented in the articles. In the event that any claims for damages are made, the publisher will not be held legally liable. The publisher or the editor-in-chief are also not responsible for any failures of the software for verifying the authenticity of articles or unidentified plagiarism.