EDITORIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to RAD Journal will be published. The Editor-in-Chief is guided by the Editorial Policy and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to decide not to publish submitted manuscripts in case it is found that they do not meet relevant standards concerning the content and formal aspects. The publishing office will inform the authors whether the manuscript is accepted for publication as soon as possible, preferably within 12 weeks from the date of the manuscript submission.

The Editorial Board must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. In case one or more members of the Editorial Board hold a conflict of interest regarding a submitted manuscript, these members of the Editorial Board shall withdraw from the selection of reviewers and all decisions related to the manuscript.

The Editorial Board shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

The Editor and editorial staff must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

The Editorial Board shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors before, during and after the evaluation process.

AUTHORS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

Originality and Primary Publication

Authors must guarantee that the article is their original work, that it has not been previously published in any form (printed or electronic) and that the article is not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Parallel submission of the same manuscript to another journal constitutes misconduct and eliminates the manuscript from consideration by RAD Journal.

Also, authors must guarantee that RAD Centre will be the first publisher of the article and that they will not submit the article for publication to any other journal/proceedings following the acceptance of publication in RAD Journal.

An article is not acceptable for the submission to the RAD Journal if it, or its substance, has been made publicly available in the following:

· a serial, periodical, or book;
· a conference report or symposium proceedings;
· a technical bulletin or company white paper;
· a public website; or
· any other retrievable source.

The following does not preclude the submission to, or publication by, RAD Journal:

· posting of a method/protocol on a public website;
· posting of a limited amount of original data on a personal/university/corporate website or websites of small collaborative groups working on a problem;
· deposit of unpublished sequence data in a public database;
· preliminary disclosures of research findings as meeting posters, webcast as meeting presentations, or published in abstract form as adjuncts to a meeting, e.g., part of a program;
· posting of theses and dissertations on a personal/university-hosted website.

In case a submitted manuscript is a result of a research project, or its previous version has been presented at a conference (under the same or similar title), detailed information about the project, the conference, etc. shall be provided in a footnote or Acknowledgments. A paper that has already been published in another journal cannot be reprinted in RAD Journal.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that manuscripts submitted to RAD Journal are written with ethical standards in mind (for example, see the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)). Authors affirm that the manuscript contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of third parties. The Publisher shall not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Reporting standards

A submitted manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to permit reviewers and, subsequently, readers to verify the claims presented in it. The deliberate presentation of false claims is a violation of ethical standards.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the content of their submissions and must make sure that they have the permission from all involved parties to make the data public.

Authors wishing to include figures, tables or other materials that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s). Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Ethics

Experimental research on vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must comply with institutional (e.g. Institutional Animal Care and Use Guidelines), national (e.g. Law for animal welfare protection) and international guidelines (e.g. Directive 2010/63/EU in Europe). It is the responsibility of the authors to obtain approval of appropriate regulatory group and report this approval in their manuscript in the first paragraph of the section Materials and Methods including the name of the regulatory group, reference number and date of the approval.

For experiments involving human subjects, authors must identify the committee approving the experiments and include with their submission a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects. This must be declared in the manuscript in the first paragraph of the Materials and Methods section.

Authorship

Authors must make sure that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors. If persons other than authors were involved in important aspects of the research project and the preparation of the manuscript, their contribution should be acknowledged in a footnote or the Acknowledgments section.

Acknowledgment of Sources

Authors are required to properly cite sources that have significantly influenced their research and their manuscript. They are expected to correctly reference each quote and idea from someone else’s work and to list all references used according to the Guidelines for Authors. Information received in a private conversation or correspondence with third parties, in reviewing project applications, manuscripts and similar materials must not be used without the express written consent of the information source.

Plagiarism

A misuse of another person’s intellectual property is plagiarism. Authors must follow the highest ethical standards when writing their articles. Plagiarism, where someone assumes another’s ideas, words, or other creative expression as one’s own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of the copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism includes the following:

● Word for word, or almost word for word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author’s work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);
● Copying equations, figures or tables from someone else’s paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Authors should also avoid self-plagiarism, that is, recycling their previously-published works without properly citing all such parts.

Therefore, authors should warrant that no part of the Article is copied from any other work, that they have obtained all the required permissions and that they have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the article is accurate and does not contain anything which is libellous, or obscene, or infringes on anyone’s copyright, right of privacy, or other rights.

Please note that all submissions to RAD Journal Journal are thoroughly checked for plagiarism by the CrossCheck Powered by iThenticate service.

Any manuscript that shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected and authors will be excluded from future publication in RAD Journal.

In case plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the Journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described below under Retraction policy, and authors will be excluded from future publication in RAD Journal.

Conflict of interest

Authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might have influenced the presented results or their interpretation.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the Journal’s Editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.

By submitting a manuscript, the authors agree to abide by the RAD Journal’ Editorial Policies.

REVIEWERS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

Reviewers are required to provide written, competent and unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the manuscript.

The reviewers assess the manuscript for the compliance with the profile of the Journal, the relevance of the investigated topic and applied methods, the originality and scientific relevance of information presented in the manuscript, the presentation style and scholarly apparatus.

Reviewers should alert the Editor to any well-founded suspicions or the knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and alert the Editor to substantial similarities between a reviewed manuscript and any manuscript published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, in the event they are aware of such. Reviewers should also alert the Editor to a parallel submission of the same manuscript to another journal, in the event they are aware of such.

Reviewers must not have a conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that a prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editor without delay.

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate.

Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

PEER REVIEW

The submitted manuscripts are subject to a peer review process. The purpose of peer review is to assists the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communication with the author. It may also assist the author in improving the manuscript.

RAD Journal uses Single-blind Peer Review.

Every submitted manuscript is considered by at least two reviewers.

The preferable duration of a peer review procedure is twelve weeks. The reviewers do not receive honoraria for their work.

The choice of reviewers is at the Editorial Board discretion. The reviewers must be knowledgeable about the subject area of the manuscript; they must not be from the authors’ own institution and they should not have recent joint publications with any of the authors.

All of the reviewers of a manuscript act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities. If the decisions of the reviewers are in discrepancies, the Editor-in-Chief may assign additional reviewers or the final decision may be done by the Editorial Board.

During the review process, the Editor may require authors to provide additional information (including raw data) if they are necessary for the evaluation of the scholarly merit of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

The Editorial Team shall ensure reasonable quality control for the reviews. With respect to reviewers whose reviews are convincingly questioned by authors, special attention will be paid to ensure that the reviews are objective and high in academic standard. When there is any doubt with regard to the objectivity of the reviews or quality of the review, additional reviewers will be assigned.

PROCEDURES FOR DEALING WITH UNETHICAL BEHAVIOUR

Anyone may inform the editors at any time of suspected unethical behaviour or any type of misconduct by giving the necessary information/evidence to start an investigation.

Investigation

● Editor-in-Chief will consult with the Editorial Board on decisions regarding the initiation of an investigation.

● During an investigation, any evidence should be treated as strictly confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in investigating.

● The accused will always be given the chance to respond to any charges made against them.

● If it is judged at the end of the investigation that misconduct has occurred, then it will be classified as either minor or serious.

Minor misconduct

Minor misconduct will be dealt directly with those involved without involving any other parties,

e.g.:

● Communicating to authors/reviewers whenever a minor issue involving a misunderstanding or misapplication of academic standards has occurred.

● A warning letter to an author or reviewer regarding minor misconduct.

Major misconduct

The Editor-in-Chief, in consultation with the Editorial Board, and, when appropriate, further consultation with a small group of experts, should make any decision regarding the course of action to be taken using the evidence available. The possible outcomes are as follows (these can be used separately or jointly):

● Publication of a formal announcement or editorial describing the misconduct.

● Informing the author’s (or reviewer’s) head of department or employer of any misconduct by means of a formal letter.

● The formal, announced retraction of publications from the Journal in accordance with the Retraction Policy (see below).

● A ban on submissions from that author for a defined period.

● Referring a case to a professional organization or legal authority for further investigation and action.

When dealing with unethical behaviour, the Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):

http://publicationethics.org/resources/ .

RETRACTION POLICY

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or any major misconduct require retraction of an article. Occasionally, a retraction can be used to correct errors in a submission or publication. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistake while preserving the integrity of science; it is not to punish the author.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by RAD Journal: in the electronic version of the retraction note, a link is made to the original article. In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged with a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

RAD Journal is an Open Access Journal, which means that all content is freely available online, immediately upon publication, without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

RAD Journal has no Article Submission Charge (ASC).

APC has to be paid by bank transfer based on the proforma invoice provided by the Publisher. All bank charges for the money transfer services must be paid by the authors. There is no possibility to wave the APC or decrease its amount.

Self-archiving Policy

The journal RAD Journal allows authors to deposit author's pre-print and/or post-print (accepted version) and/or Publisher’s PDF in an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, such as PubMed Central, Europe PMC or arXiv or to publish it on author's personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.) and/or departmental website, at any time after publication (pre-print is the version of the paper before peer review and post-print is the version of the paper after peer-review, with revisions having been made). Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and a link must be made to the article's DOI.

Copyright and Licensing

Authors retain copyright of the published papers and grant to the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media.

The published articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Anyone is free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. Sharing and adapting can be done under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Authors may enter separate, additional contractual arrangements for non-exclusive distribution of the Journal published paper (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal.

The authors and third parties who wish to use the article in a way not covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) must obtain a written consent of the publisher.

DISCLAIMER

The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the Editorial Board and the Publishing Office. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in the articles.

The Publisher shall have no liability in the event of issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.