DISEM adheres to the following ethical principles based on the guidelines and policies made by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Thus, it is all of the stakeholders of DISEM must adopt, embrace and follow the ethical principles below.
Ethical Responsibilities of Authors
The ethical responsibilities of the authors that apply to DISEM are as below:
• The authors must not send a manuscript that was published in or sent to be published in another journal and DISEM at the same time.
• The authors must send original manuscripts to DISEM. Authors must refer to the sources that they used in writing manuscripts in the correct way in the direction of ethical principles.
• Persons who do not contribute to the manuscripts must not be listed as authors, and changing the order of the authors of a published article and/or adding other authors must not be requested.
• Reviewers must notify the editors of the conflicts and collaborations about the manuscripts.
• In the evaluation process of the manuscripts, the authors must provide the editorial staff with information about the manuscripts or the raw data if required.
• The authors must document the rights to use the data that they use in their manuscripts, the permission for research or the approval of the participants to whom they have searched.
• Authors must communicate with the editors to provide information, to correct the manuscript, or to withdraw it when they are aware of an error that is associated with the evaluation and early appearance phase, or the published article in electronic form.
• The author(s) must specify that they received the ethics committee approval for the research that require data collection by using quantitative or qualitative methods such as experiment, survey, scale, interview, observation, focus group work that require ethics committee decision. The author(s) must also specify the name of the ethics committee, the date and the number of the ethics committee decision on the first-last page and in the method section of the manuscript. In addition, the author(s) must include information that the informed consent form was received for the case reports in the articles.
• The author(s) must present proof of their ethical principles for data collection process (such as obtaining permission from others to use their documents such as scale, questionnaire, photograph etc.) in the manuscript. It must be noted in the manuscripts that the author(s) obeyed copyright regulations for research and publication ethics and intellectual and artistic works. If the research is conducted on human and animal subjects, it must be reported in the article that the research was carried out in accordance with international reports, guidelines, etc.
• The author(s) must follow the related national and international rules and regulations, if their research includes animal and/or human subjects (for example, WMA Helsinki Declaration, PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, The EU Directive on the Use of Animals); to prove that the necessary permissions and approvals are provided; to respect the privacy of subjects/participants.
• Ethics committee approval is not required for review articles from the author(s). However, it must be stated in the manuscript not requiring an ethics committee decision that the ethics committee decision is not required on the first-last page and in the method section of the article.
Ethical Responsibilities of Editors and Co-Editors
• Editors inform reviewers, authors, researchers and readers, and answer their questions clearly within the principles of clarity.
• Editors, during the publication process, consider that the articles must be original and contribute to the literature, the readers and researchers.
• When editors make decisions about the publication of the manuscript, they consider originality, contribution to the field, clarity of expressions, content and validity and reliability of the research.
• Editors take the manuscript without any problem to the preliminary evaluation, consider positive views of reviewers, and they do not change the decisions of the reviewers unless there is a serious problem against publishing.
• Editors implement the policies of the blind review and evaluation processes, keep private personal identity information of the authors, and provide impartial evaluation processes in due of time for the manuscript.
• Editors send the manuscripts to the field editors and reviewers of the journal considering their professional fields, and care that the manuscripts are evaluated impartially and independently.
• Editors, in evaluation processes, consider if there are conflicts or collaborations between authors and reviewers or not.
• Editors generate a large number or reviewers, and they update it consistently.
• Editors prevent non-scientific that do not comply with academic etiquette rules.
• Editors ensure that journal publishing processes are operated in accordance with publishing policies and guidelines, inform those who are in the process of the developments on publishing policies, and prepare training programs when necessary.
• Editors communicate effectively with everyone involved in the publishing processes, and organize meetings at regular intervals.
• Editors provide protection of personal data in assessed articles; they keep personal data of authors, referees and readers.
• Editors attach importance to the protection of human and animal rights in the manuscripts, emphasize that the clear approval of the participants of the article is documented, or reject the manuscripts that does not have the approval of the ethics committee on the participants of the article and without any permit in experimental investigations.
• Editors take precautions against misconduct. When there are complaints about the abuse of duty, they share the findings about the subject by conducting an objective investigation.
• Editors point errors, inconsistencies, or misleading errors in manuscripts to be corrected.
• Editors protect the intellectual property rights of the published articles, and defend the rights of the journal and the author (s) in case of violation. Editors also take the necessary precautions to ensure that the content of the published articles does not infringe the intellectual property rights of other publications; they control authenticity-similarity.
• Editors consider consistent critiques for the articles published in the journal and enables authors to answer these critiques.
• Editors also consider the research that includes negative conclusions.
• Editors evaluate the complaints that are sent to the journal and make necessary statements.
Ethical Responsibilities of Reviewers
The articles in DISEM are evaluated by double-blind review in a process, which neither the authors know the reviewers nor the reviewers know the authors.
Reviewers cannot communicate the authors directly; manuscript evaluation forms and proofreading requests are sent to the authors through the website of the journal. Reviewers must bear the ethical responsibilities in DISEM outlined as below:
• Reviewers must only accept to evaluate the manuscripts that are related to the field of their specializations.
• Reviewers must make the evaluation impartially and confidentially. In accordance with this principle, the manuscripts that they review must be annihilated after the evaluation process, but they must be used after publication. Nationality, gender, religious beliefs, political beliefs and commercial concerns must not distort the impartiality of the evaluation.
• If reviewers understand that there is a conflict or collaboration, they must inform the editors and refuse to evaluate the manuscript.
• Reviewers must evaluate manuscripts with a constructive attitude in accordance with the academic etiquette rules; they must refrain from insulting and hostile personal comments.
• Reviewers must evaluate the manuscripts that they agree on during the evaluation.
Ethical Responsibilities of the Publisher
Anadolu University, the publisher of DISEM, is a public-spirited and nonprofit-making public educational institution.
The publisher accepts that the editor and editorial board are entitled to make all the decisions related to reviewing, editorial, and publication processes.
Plagiarism Policy
The authors are required to send their plagiarism reports to disem@anadolu.edu.tr when they submit their manuscripts to DISEM. The manuscripts having correspondences with other studies over 20% will be sent back to their authors without the initiation of the peer-review policy. The authors may submit their manuscripts after ensuring that the correspondence report of their respective manuscripts shows less than 20% similarity.
Transfer of the Copy Rights
• The manuscripts that are sent to DISEM for publication should not be published or sent for publication elsewhere. During the process of manuscript submission, the authors are required to declare that their manuscript has not been published or submitted for publication by any other means. Otherwise, the authors will be responsible for the consequences.
• The authors are expected to transfer the copyrights to DISEM while submitting their studies. This transfer agreement comes into force after the acceptance of the manuscript for publication.
• The authors may continue to have the rights to publishing the content of the manuscript on their personal websites, or in their institutions’ open access archives; they may produce copies of the manuscript for personal use, and they may use its content in their other works in part or as a whole by citing it aptly.
• While using tables, figures, and other kinds of verbal and/or visual materials published within the content of a manuscript either in paper-based or in electronic format, the authors are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder. The authors are obliged to legal, financial, and penal responsibilities related to this issue.
• Authors must fill in the “Copy Rights Transfer Agreement”. Then sign it with the wet ink signature, scan the signed form and send it back to DISEM through email: disem@anadolu.edu.tr.
Conflict of Interests
• Matters in which persons or groups benefit economically or personally may also cause a conflict of interests. The reliability of scientific research and published papers is partly related to objectively handling the conflicts of interests in the processes of planning, applying, writing, assessing, revising and publishing them.
• Financial relations might include the most easily defined conflicts of interests, which may inevitably influence the reliability of the journal as well as the authors in a negative way. These conflicts may arise from various issues including inter-personal relationships, academic competition, or intellectual approaches. The authors may want to avoid from those sponsors, either commercial or non-profit ones, that may restrict access to all study data or propose to interfere the processes of data analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, publication and etc.
• In order to prevent any conflict of interests, the editors do not assign specific people as reviewers for such manuscripts. When the Editor gives the final decision about a manuscript, they must ensure that they do not have a personal or financial relationship with the author(s).
• In order to make the reviewing processes independent of any unethical conduct, the authors are expected to inform the Editorial Board in case of a potential conflict of interests.
• The Editorial Board of DISEM promises to consider all these possibilities and strive to make the reviewing process as objective as possible.
Creative Commons (CC)
A Creative Commons license means that material with copyrights may freely be accessed and used by other parties. If an author wants to share their work with others and provide them to make changes or amendments in its content, they use a CC license.
All of the articles published by DISEM are licensed with “Creative Commons Attribution License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND)”. This license entitles all parties to use a scientific work for a non-profit purpose under the condition of providing references.
Open Access Policy
Open access is an approach that makes interdisciplinary communication easier and encourages cooperation among different disciplines. Therefore, DISEM contributes to field of education and teacher training by providing more access to its articles and a more transparent review process.