Publication ethics

Rirea Publication Ethics

Our editors and employees work hard to ensure the content we publish is ethically sound.

• Journal policies on authorship and contributorship: Authorship should be limited to those who have made a major contribution to the conception, design, implementation, or interpretation of the study, and should be listed as co-authors. Others, who have participated in specific substantive areas of the study endeavour, should be thanked or identified as contributors. Only persons who meet these authorship criteria should be listed as authors in the manuscript as they must be able to take public responsibility for the content: (i) made significant contributions to the conception, design, execution, data acquisition, or analysis/interpretation of the study; and (ii) drafted the manuscript or revised it critically for important intellectual content; and (iii) have seen and approved the final version of the paper and agreed to its submission for publication. All persons who made substantial contributions to the work reported in the manuscript but who do not meet the criteria for authorship must not be listed as an author but should be acknowledged in the "Acknowledgements" section after their written permission to be named as been obtained. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors (according to the above definition) and no inappropriate co-authors are included in the author list and verify that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to its submission for publication.
• How the journal will handle complaints and appeals:  All authors have the opportunity to challenge the rejection of their submission. Authors can appeal directly by contacting the editorial office. Appeals will be assessed in the light of the manuscript’s scientific content and its eligibility for publication. The Senior Editor’s decision on the appeal will be final. We will consider appeals against the editorial judgment only under highly particular circumstances and usually only if a clear infringement of policy can be proved or author can indicate a clear misunderstanding of the article by the reviewer.

Any appeals against the editorial decision must be submitted by email to direzionescientifica@rirea.it within two weeks of the decision. You will need to provide a clear explanation of why you disagree with the judgment and include supporting facts. You should also submit the article title and DOI if you are appealing a decision to retract a published article and the manuscript ID number you are appealing a decision to reject an unpublished manuscript.

All complaints can be made directly to the editorial office. They will be delighted to outline the complaint procedure in full.

A formal recognition of the complaint will be provided within five working days. Every endeavour will be made to offer a full response within four weeks. Otherwise, regular interim communications will be provided, at least once in every four weeks.

Complaints will be dealt with by the journal office wherever practicable, with adherence to RIREA policies and procedures, but will be escalated to the Corresponding Editor where necessary. The Corresponding Editor has the right to consult the other Editors or with any other party about the problem and make a final decision. That final decision shall be binding, and the issue shall be deemed closed.

• Journal policies on conflicts of interest / competing interests: Editors and editorial board members will not exploit unpublished information revealed in a submitted manuscript for their own research objectives without the authors’ clear written authorization. Privileged information or ideas gained by editors as a result of handling the manuscript shall be kept confidential and not exploited for their personal advantage. Editors will recuse themselves from considering manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships/connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the papers; instead, they will ask another member of the editorial board to handle the manuscript. Any invited referee who has conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the manuscript and the work described therein should immediately notify the editors to declare their conflicts of interest and decline the invitation to review so that alternative reviewers can be contacted. All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. Sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.
• Journal policies on data sharing and reproducibility: At RIREA we are devoted to fostering openness, transparency and reproducibility of research. We support and encourage research data to be disseminated, discoverable, citable, and recognized as an intellectual product of worth. RIREA vary in their attitude to, and regulations on research data sharing. The majority of RIREA publications adopt a minimal standard which encourages authors, where relevant, and subject to ethical and legal issues, to publicly disclose, cite, and link to their research data.
• Journal’s policy on ethical oversight: The policy of the journal regarding the oversight of how the ethical principles are followed is based on mutual trust among the participants in the publication process and the expectation of mandatory adherence to all of the publication ethics principles.

We focus on the СОPE definition, of Ethical oversight, namely “Ethical oversight should include, but is not limited to, policies on consent to publication, publication on vulnerable populations, ethical conduct of research using animals, ethical conduct of research using human subjects, handling confidential data and of business/marketing practices”. According to this concept, the editorial staff of journals is concerned with adhering to ethical principles.

The journals will be obligated to accept appeals from the Ethics and Oversight Committee for professional and scientific activity on our authors' violations of ethical principles. Other appeals will also be considered if they are not anonymous and substantiated

• Journal’s policy on intellectual property: RIREA does not require writers to grant copyright to the journal for previously published original research publications. Articles are published under a CC BY license (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License). Many research funding sources favour the CC BY license because it provides for maximal dissemination and re-use of open access materials. Users are permitted to share (copy, distribute, and transmit) and remix (alter) the contribution under this license, even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit the author or licensor in the manner stated by the author or licensor.
• Journal’s options for post-publication discussions and corrections: Articles in Press that include errors or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors may be “Withdrawn” from RIREA. Withdrawn means that the article content (html and PDF) is removed and replaced with a HTML page and PDF simply stating that it has been withdrawn according to the RIREA Policy. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. A retraction note is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list. In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory, infringes others' legal rights, or is the subject of a court order.

Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct

• Before a paper is published, the RIREA editors take reasonable steps to identify and prohibit it from being published if it contains evidence of research misconduct, such as plagiarism, citation manipulation, result fabrication, or data falsification or fabrication. If an allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article in the journal is brought to the attention of the RIREA editors after publication, the allegation will be addressed by the editor-in-chief or the assigned editor, who will follow the guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Allegations of research misconduct relating to a published article will be addressed by the editor-in-chief or the assigned editor. The Editors and Editorial Office will first perform a preliminary evaluation to determine if there is merit to the claims. If the claims appear to have merit, the next step is to contact the authors. The Editors may request that the authors retract their paper. If the authors refuse, the Journal will publish a Retraction. The final Retraction will describe the reason for retraction as well as a list of authors agreeing (and if necessary, those disagreeing) with the retraction.
• In no case shall a journal and members of the editorial board and international scientific committee encourage misconduct of any type or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place. Members of the editorial board and international scientific committee shall endeavour to prevent misbehaviour by alerting authors and reviewers about the ethical behaviour demanded of them. Members of the editorial board, scientific committee, and reviewers are asked to be aware of all sorts of misconduct in order to detect papers where research misconduct of any kind has or seems to have occurred and deal with the allegations properly.
• In the event that misconduct has or seems to have occurred, or in the case of needed corrections, the editorial board deals with the different cases by following the appropriate COPE recommendations. Great care will be taken to distinguish cases of honest human error from deliberate intent to defraud.