Manipulation Prevention
Prevention of manipulation
The editorial policy regarding the prevention of manipulation is aimed at preventing the publication of falsified data, plagiarism, theft (attribution) of other people's names for authors' collectives, as well as preventing situations that may lead to biased expert assessment at the stage of reviewing manuscripts.
Based on these principles, each of the journals of the publishing house, within the framework of its regulations:
– accepts for consideration only those manuscripts that are accompanied by a License Agreement signed by the authors, in which the corresponding author is recorded ;
– checks the availability of the relevant competencies among potential reviewers and confirms that they have no conflicts of interest;
– verifies the accuracy of data about a potential reviewer based on available identifiers (ORCID, profiles in indexing resources) and data on institutions with which the potential reviewer is affiliated, and, if necessary, a request is made to the appropriate institution;
– monitors the reviewing process for the reviewers' compliance with the regulations and identifying possible factors for the manifestation of atypical actions on the part of reviewers, which may have signs of manipulation during the reviewing process. The editors are guided by the COPE recommendations "How to spot potential manipulation of the peer review process".
In the event that a situation arises when atypical actions are noticed in the behavior of one of the reviewers or both reviewers *, the editorial board may attract other reviewers, including those recommended by the authors when submitting the manuscript as potential. In this case, the editorial board checks the possibility of attracting these reviewers (the reliability of their data, competence, affiliation with the institution, re-confirmation by the corresponding author, etc.) and, in case of successful verification, contacts the reviewers. The editors are guided by the COPE recommendations "What to do if you suspect peer review manipulation".
* all articles submitted for consideration for publication go through the stage of double-blind peer review. In some cases, the editor may also contact the reviewer(s) identified by the authors as potential for additional peer review.