ETHICAL PRINCIPLES AND PUBLICATION POLICY

Ethical Principles

Kırşehir Ahi Evran University Journal of the Instute of Natural and Applied Sciences (KUJINAS) is a peer-reviewed journal whose qualified scientific articles in the fields of science are published in accordance with the ethical principles and rules stated below. Articles submitted to KUJINAS are evaluated by double-blind peer-review process and published electronically with free access. KUJINAS undertakes to comply with the publication ethics rules at all stages of the publication process. KUJINAS' publishing processes are based on the impartial generation, development and sharing of knowledge through scientific method. The ethical duties and responsibilities of KUJINAS are written in the light of the guidelines and policies prepared by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). In this context, KUJINAS is committed to maintaining the highest ethical standards for all parties (authors, reviewers and editorial board) publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Below are the ethical responsibilities, roles, and duties of the authors, journal editor, reviewers, and publisher. The ethical principles and rules below have been prepared in accordance with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (Committe on Publication Ethics - COPE (https://publicationethics.org/).

Ethical Duties and Responsibilities of KUJINAS Editor, Assistant Editor, and Field Editors

Publication Decisions: Editors are responsible for deciding which scientific studies submitted to the KUJINAS journal will be published. While deciding whether to publish the articles, the editors pay attention to the originality of the articles, to contribute to the scientific field writing, and to the readers, researchers and practitioners. This decision is for increasing the quality of the studies to be published in our journal and for the continuity of the journal processes. Editors take into consideration the original value of the articles, their contribution to the field, the validity and reliability of the research method, the clarity of the narrative, and the purpose and scope of the journal when making a positive or negative decision about the articles. In addition, the editors seek to ensure that the referee pool consists of a wide range and is constantly updated.

Editors: are responsible for observing the journal publication principles, journal aims and international standards in the articles to be published in the journal. In this context, the evaluation process of the scientific study can be terminated by considering all kinds of copyright infringement, plagiarism and legal requirements that will harm the quality of our journal.

Fairness and Impartiality: The editor impartially evaluates the scientific studies submitted to KUJINAS, regardless of the race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, nationality or political opinion of the authors. Editors send the articles by taking into consideration the field of expertise of the editors and the referees, and support the impartial and independent evaluations.

Confidentiality: KUJINAS editors do not disclose any information in scientific studies submitted to our journal to anyone other than the author(s), referees and publisher. Editors ensure the protection of personal data in the evaluated articles; they protect the individual data of authors, referees and readers. In order to achieve this, the editors apply the policies of blind refereeing and evaluation process, which are among the publication policies of the journal, keep the identity information of the referees confidential, and evaluate each article impartially and in time.

Benefiting: The editors cannot use the information and materials in a scientific study sent to KUJINAS in their own research without the ethical permission of the author(s). Editors; take action against misconduct. When there are complaints about misconduct, they make an objective investigation and share the relevant findings.

Ethical Duties and Responsibilities of Referees

Articles submitted to KUJINAS for publication first undergo editorial review. Editors examine the study in terms of purpose, scope, method and writing principles. As a result of this review, studies that have the qualifications to be published in our journal are sent to at least two different referees. With the applied two-way blind refereeing principle, the referees cannot communicate directly with the authors. The reviewers' evaluations for the article and the requested changes are sent to the editors through the journal management system, and the editors forward them to the authors. In this context, KUJINAS referees are expected to have the following ethical duties and responsibilities:

• Referees must be experts on the subject on which they express their opinions. Researchers who receive a referee proposal should reject the referee proposal if they do not have enough information about the subject.
• There should be impartiality and confidentiality in referee evaluations. In addition, the referees should destroy the studies they have reviewed after the evaluation process, in accordance with the principle of confidentiality.
• Reviewers should not have a conflict of interest with the research or the authors. When reviewers feel that there is a conflict of interest, they should refuse to evaluate the article and inform the editors.
• Reviewers should evaluate the article objectively and only evaluate the content. Referees should not allow nationality, gender, religious beliefs, political or commercial concerns to influence the evaluation.
• As a requirement of their responsibilities as educators and instructors, the referees should make the evaluation in a constructive language in accordance with academic etiquette and guide the authors; Personal comments and expressions containing insults, slander and hostility, hurtful and degrading comments, and statements about the inadequacy of the author(s) should be avoided.
• The referees should evaluate the accepted article in due time and within the framework of the above ethical responsibilities.

Responsibilities of the KUJINAS Author(s)

Articles should not be contrary to scientific and ethical rules (plagiarism, forgery, distortion, republishing, slicing, unfair authorship, not specifying the supporting organization, not complying with ethical rules in studies on animals, etc.). The author(s) is responsible for its compliance.

The author(s) must provide assurance that the article is original. The article should not have been previously published elsewhere and should not be currently under review by another journal.

The author(s) has obtained ethics committee approval for studies that require data collection through quantitative or qualitative methods such as experiments, questionnaires, scales, interviews, observations, focus group studies that require an ethics committee decision; Ethics committee name, decision date and number should be stated in the material, method or acknowledgment section of the candidate article, and the document showing the ethics committee decision should be uploaded to the system with the application of the article.

The copyright laws and agreements in the work must be observed by the author(s). If copyrighted materials (for example, tables, figures, or large quotations) are used in the work, necessary ethical permissions should be used.

The author(s) should include the sources used in the study appropriately in the reference part of the article.

“Author” is a researcher who makes a significant contribution to the conceptualization and design of a published study, to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data, to writing the manuscript or to critically reviewing it in terms of content. The author also plans, implements and/or revises the work in the article. In this context, the author(s) in the article should have a direct contribution from the idea stage to the final stage of the article, both academically and scientifically. Persons who provide funding for the research, only collect data or advise the research group at the final stage do not have author rights. In order for a researcher to be an author in the article, they must meet all the criteria listed above. All individuals who did not meet the criteria for authorship but contributed to the study should be listed in the "Acknowledgement" section. Examples of these are people who only provide technical support, help with writing, or just provide general support, and financial and material support.

The names of the authors should be listed in accordance with scientific research and publication ethics. The order of names of the authors should be a joint decision in this direction. All authors must indicate the author rank on the copyright transfer form, signed.

In case raw data or information is requested from the author(s) regarding their articles during the evaluation process, the requested information should be submitted to the editor by the author(s).

If the author detects an obvious error or mistake in his article published in KUJINAS, he has the responsibility to immediately contact and cooperate with the editor for correction or retraction of these inaccuracies.

Publication Policy

In KUJINAS, researchers are free to publish their scientific studies as articles. In addition, peer review is free of charge. There is no charge for other researchers to download and read the articles published in our journal. All issues of KUJINAS can be accessed from the website of Journal of Institute of the Natural and Applied Sciences (ahievran.edu.tr).

All articles sent to KUJINAS should be scanned by the responsible author with the IThenticate (http://www.ithenticate.com/) software program before printing, and the scanned version and the report part should be uploaded to the KUJINAS system together with the article. Articles with a similarity rate of 20% or less, made as a result of the examination of the plagiarism program, are accepted to our journal for evaluation. Two ways are followed for studies exceeding this rate. First, studies with more than 20% are examined in detail and sent back to the authors for revision or correction if necessary. In another way, if plagiarism or unethical behavior is detected in the study, its publication is rejected by our journal.

The evaluation stages of a study submitted to KUJINAS are as follows:

1. Pre-examination phase: The study sent to our journal is taken into pre-examination. At this preliminary examination stage;

• The writing format of the study is examined.
• The study is scanned for similarity with the IThenticate program.
• It is checked whether the study is suitable for the sample article template on the website of our journal.
• The responsible author of the work that does not fit the template is informed and given one week (7 days) for correction.
• In case the work is published as an article, the necessary presentation and copyright transfer form information is checked.

After this preliminary review stage, the current study moves to the evaluation stage.

2. Evaluation phase: At this stage;

• In the evaluation process of scientific studies sent to KUJINAS, a double-blind refereeing system is used, in which the referees and authors cannot see each other's information.
• At least two referees are appointed for the evaluation of the scientific work. Referees are given 21 days for evaluation. If the evaluation process is not completed, an additional 7 days is given.
• Evaluation result; It can be rejection, correction or acceptance. According to the evaluation result, the following item(s) are applied:
• As a result of peer-reviewed studies, the process of rejected studies is terminated and the study is not accepted as an article. In case of equality, that is, for the work accepted by one referee and rejected by the other referee, a third referee is appointed and the article is accepted/rejected according to the evaluation of this referee.
• If corrections are requested for the study, which is considered to be accepted as an article by the referees, the author is requested to make corrections in line with the referee's opinions.

If the scientific study is accepted, it goes to the editing stage.

3. Layout stage: At this stage, the article accepted by the referees is reviewed according to the KUJINAS spelling rules. Corrections are requested from the author if necessary.

4. Concluding stage: In this final stage, the article evaluation process is completed and a notification message is sent to the responsible author. The article acceptance process takes an average of 3 months. In case the article is published in our journal, presentation and copyright transfer form information is checked. The copyright transfer form should be downloaded from the article submission page and signed by all the Author(s), then scanned in PDF format and uploaded to the system. The copyright transfer form should contain the following information.

"1. All kinds of broadcasting rights belong to KUJINAS,

  2. It complies with the writing and publication rules specified by the journal,

  3. The article is original and has not been previously published in Turkish or a foreign language at home or abroad, or is not in the process of being evaluated for publication,

  4. In the event that the scientific and ethical responsibility belongs to us, other Author(s) cannot be reached; I accept and declare that all the Author(s) are aware of the work and that I take the responsibilities of the other Author(s) as the first author of the article."

07 APRIL 2020 EASE STATEMENT ON QUALITY STANDARDS

The European Association of Science Editors encourages all editors to provide the EASE Statement on Quality Standards that COVID-19 research reports meet the required standards and adhere to agreed guidelines and that any limitations are clearly stated.