Declaration of publishing ethics

The Editor’s office in its activity is governed by the Law of Russian Federation “Concerning Mass Media”, by the Editor’s office by-law and by recommendations and standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, http://publicationethics.org/).

The Editor’s office studies and considers the significant experience of authoritative international journals and publishing houses and it does its best to following the ethical practice accepted by the international scientific society. Declaration of scientific publishing ethics unites and reveals general principles and rules to be mutually obeyed by the participants of the scientific publishing process: authors, reviewers, editors, and the publisher.  

1. General requirements to manuscripts and authorship retaining.

- In case of submitting a manuscript, containing results of investigations financed by organizations that are sponsoring, for instance, grants, authors are obliged to mention this fact. For example, “The work is carried out within the project # X.XXX.2014/S of the state task of the Ministry of Science of RF for the period 2014–2016 in Kalashnikov ISTU”.

- The bibliography list should contain real existing sources. If internet sources are used, their hyper-links should be valid.

- It is necessary to acknowledge the contribution of other people to the carried out investigation. The authors should refer to other publications that have been important when carrying out the scientific work considered in the manuscript. Information obtained unofficially (for instance, during conversation, correspondence or within some discussion with the third party) should not be used or presented without the proved permission of the primary source (for example, in a written form). Information obtained from confidential sources (for instance, about receiving the grant for carrying out the investigation) should not be mentioned in the manuscript without the corresponding permission of the manuscript author involved into these confidential sources.

- One should not publish many manuscripts dedicated to one and the same investigation in more than one issue as original works. The revealed fact of submitting of the manuscript to more than one journal simultaneously will be considered as violation of the publishing ethics. In this case the journal “Bulletin of Kalashnikov ISTU” will be rejecting the publication of any manuscripts under consideration.

2. Originality and plagiarism.

- Plagiarism as presentation of someone else’s work as the author one and/or copying, rephrasing of significant parts of someone else’s works (without mentioning the authorship), statement of personal rights for results of someone else’s investigations results in manuscripts submitted to the journal “Bulletin of Kalashnikov ISTU” is unacceptable. Plagiarism in all its forms represents unethical actions.   

- The journal “Bulletin of Kalashnikov ISTU” does not publish plagiarism, including works containing plagiarism of a text, plagiarism of ideas and plagiarism of information.

- Authors of manuscripts should present absolutely original works. Mentioning of results of other authors’ investigations should be accompanied by references to corresponding original sources to be obligatory included to the reference list. Citation of the text previously published anywhere should be documented as a “DIRECT SPEECH”, enclosed within quotation marks and written in italics with obligatory mentioning of the original source. Inclusion of bulky fragments of unoriginal texts is inacceptable.

- Manuscripts submitted to the journal “Bulletin of Kalashnikov ISTU” are subjected to checking of the text plagiarism via the system “ANTI-PLAGIARISM”. When unauthorized takings and the low factor of the text originality (<80 %) are revealed, the manuscript is rejected from publication.

- Revealing the plagiarism of ideas and plagiarism of data is performed within the scientific investigation and after publication of manuscripts, including the fact of the corresponding inquiry from readers. If the fact of unauthorized taking of information (including results of the scientific work or ideas) is established, the manuscript will be withdrawn and rejected from publication even if it has already been published.

3. Author obligations.

- The authors of the manuscript can be only people who contributed considerably to generation of the work concept, development, carrying out the experiments, interpretation of investigation results and to the process of writing a manuscript itself (including those who performed scientific and stylistic correction and layout in accordance with the journal requirements).

- The first author in the list of authors should be the member of the authoring team who contributed the most to the process of the text preparation and familiar with all the process of performing the scientific work. The same author should be the “correspondence author” for communications with the journal’s editor office and readers (after the manuscript publication).

- Co-authors can be those who contributed much to preparation of the manuscript text and to the performed investigation. In cases when participants of the investigation contributed much according to a specific direction within an investigation project, they should be mentioned as people who contributed to this investigation.

- The correspondence author should make sure that all the participants who contributed to the investigation are presented as Co-authors and that Co-authors do not involve those who did not take part in the investigation, that all the Co-authors looked through and approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to submit it for publication.

- In case of arising questions related to the review process, the authors should give the mutually agreed answer.

- The authors should point that their work is being published for the first time, implying that all information in the manuscript is real and valid. If the elements of the manuscript have been published in some other paper, the authors should refer to the earlier work and emphasize the essential difference of the new work from the previous one. Word-for-word copying of individual works and their rephrasing are unacceptable, they can be used only as foundation for new conclusions. 

- All authors should reveal in their works the information about any significant conflicts of interests that can influence the results of investigation or their interpretation. Examples of possible conflicts of interests to be revealed are: obtaining financial reward for participation in investigations or writing the manuscript; any relation (work on contract, consulting, stock ownership, obtaining of remuneration, providing expert conclusions) with organizations directly interested in the object of investigation or review; application for a patent or obtaining the authorship rights to investigation results; obtaining the financial support for any stage of performing the investigation or writing a manuscript (including grants and other financial support). Apparent and possible conflicts of interest must be revealed as soon as possible. Information about conflicts of interests obtained from authors of manuscripts is not given to reviewers and it is available only to the editorial board when making a decision on publishing the manuscript. Information about conflicts of interests is published as a part of the main text of the manuscript.

- The editorial board asks authors to follow the principles of humanity and bio-ethics when studying wildlife objects.

- Authors are responsible for the quality of presented materials. The manuscript should be formatted according to requirements of the journal editorial board. Deviations from the pointed requirements are allowed only on agreement with the editorial board. Information about the authors should be valid. In case of changing some information, authors must notify the editorial board immediately.

- If the author reveals a significant mistake or inaccuracy in his published paper, he should immediately notify the journal editor or publisher about it and assist them in elimination or correction of this mistake. If the editor or publisher finds out from the third party, that the published paper contains significant mistakes, the author must immediately eliminate or correct them, or provide the editorial board some proofs of the correctness of the original paper.

4. Reviewing / Responsibility for reviewers.

- Reviews of scientific works should be objective. Personal critics of authors of the publication is not acceptable. Reviewers should express their opinion clearly and in a well-argued manner.

- Unpublished materials used in the presented manuscript must not be used in personal investigations of the reviewer without the written agreement of the author. Closed information or ideas obtained during reviewing should remain confidential and not be used for a personal benefit. Reviewers must not participate in discussing and evaluating manuscripts in which they are personally interested.

- Reviewers should reveal published materials in the manuscript under review that has not been cited by authors. Any claims, conclusions or reasons that have previously been used in some publications should be formatted correspondingly with indication of the source. The reviewer should also pay attention of the editor to significant or partial similarity with some other work the reviewer is closely familiar with.

- Any manuscript submitted to the expertise is considered as a confidential document. Its discussion with other reviewers or experts is unacceptable without preliminary permission of the chief editor.

5. Editorial obligations.

- The editors are fully authorized and responsible for the right to reject or accept the manuscript. Decision on accepting the manuscript is made with regard of the journal policy, with account of the current legislation in the field of copyright law.

- Editors should not have any conflicts of interests with regard to manuscripts they reject or accept. The editorial board evaluates manuscripts only according to their scientific content regardless of the race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious views, ethnic identity, citizenship and political opinion of authors.

- The editorial board keeps the anonymity of reviewers.

- The editor and all editorial staff are not authorized to reveal information about the presented manuscripts to anyone but the corresponding authors, reviewers, other editorial consultants and, if necessary, the publisher.

- The editor and editorial staff are not authorized to use in any way the unpublished materials contained in the presented manuscript without permission of the author.

- In case of positive decision of reviewers and the editorial board, the manuscript is published in the next issue of the journal, the authorship rights are retained by the authors.

6. Regulating by publishing ethics.

- The editing and publishing process involves a constant monitoring and retaining the principles of the publishing ethics, it provides integrity and consistency of regulations.

- Regulations of manuscript submission to the journal “Bulletin of Kalashnikov ISTU” provide unambiguous understanding of the process of the manuscript handling up to the moment of publication, the document can be downloaded for free according to the valid reference.

- The editing and publishing process implies elimination of cases of violation of intellectual property and code of ethics caused by financial mechanisms. In this relation the publishing house guarantees that the reviewing process of manuscripts prepared within performing, for instance, a scientific grant, is the same as of manuscripts prepared within independent investigations by authors.

- All types of submitted manuscripts are accepted based only on their urgent character and attractiveness to readers and are not subjected to the influence of commercial aspects. 

- If necessary, the editing and publishing staff is ready to publish corrections, clarifications of statements for the code of ethics and acting trends in the sphere of publishing processes.