[Ethics Policy in PDF]
1. Basic Instructions
a. Since 2012, the publisher of StBiSl is Comenius University, Faculty of Roman Catholic Theology of Cyril and Methodius, Kapitulská 26, 814 58 Bratislava 1, Slovakia.
b. The editor-in-chief is the managing body of StBiSl. The deputy editor-in-chief assumes the role of editor-in-chief in his absence. The executive body consists in the redactors: review redactor, executive redactor and the members of the Editorial Board.
c. Members of the Editorial and the international Advisory Board are the notables in the field of biblical exegesis and biblical theology from Slovakia, Czech Republic and from abroad. The Editorial Board (hereafter EB) is responsible for the biblical scientific development in the articles submitted to StBiSl. It should avoid any malpractice in them and should oversee maintaining and promoting the requirements of StBiSl publication ethics as well as the quality of the submitted articles.
d. The below given requirements of StBiSl publication ethics are binding for all persons who are involved in the StBiSl publication process.
2. Authorship and Responsibility of the Authors
a. The authors should submit only original manuscripts which have been written only by them, which have not been previously published and have been submitted only to the periodical StBiSl. If the authors have taken some material or data from other sources – including their own published writing – the source must be clearly cited, and the obtained permission clearly stated. In the manuscript, there can be some parts which have been already published elsewhere, but the basic part of the manuscript must be original.
b. Authors should cite all the sources (including their already published owns) they have used or to which they have referred in their articles. It is required to give information about all the obtained permissions for publication or for referring to the sources, mainly if some source have not been published yet. By the very submission of their articles, authors declare that the data used in their articles is true and not manipulated.
c. Authors should ensure that their work does not infringe on any rights of others, including privacy rights and intellectual property rights.
d. Authors should adhere to all research ethics guidelines of their discipline.
e. Authors should contact the editor-in-chief to identify and correct any material errors upon discovery, whether prior or after to publication of their article. Authors are also bound to remove or to correct all material errors which have been indicated by the reviewers in the review report.
f. Authors should be transparent. For instance, if an author is not sure whether his/her paper meets the requirement of originality (e.g., whether it might constitute duplicate publication), (s)he should immediately inform the journal’s editor-in-chief or executive editor. It is up to the editor to decide whether the paper is appropriate to publish. In that case, however, the author himself should clearly state any potential overlap in his/her paper.
g. Authors guarantee that authorship or co-authorship of the paper is accurately represented, including ensuring that all individuals credited as authors participated in the actual authorship of the work and that all who participated are credited and have given their consent for publication.
h. Authors should throughout their articles create the bibliographical references and provide a list of the bibliography at the end of the article according to the guidelines in Instructions for the contributors. They are fully responsible for right and accurate citations of the used literature and sources.
i. Authors should provide their contact details (name and surname, academic affiliation, professional or personal mailing address and e-mail) as well as the respective funding assistance. These details should be presented separately to the main text of the article to facilitate anonymous peer review process.
j. Plagiarism and the use of the unreliable sources is not tolerable.
k. Authors should ensure all the data, given in the article, are true and not manipulated. This also includes all their personal data which are required according to the rules of the StBiSl (see Instructions for the contributors).
l. Authors can appeal against the decision of the editor-in-chief, or the EB respectively. Unsolved problems are treated in accordance with the rules of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). See http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines.
2. Review Process and Responsibility of Reviewers
a. StBiSl operates an anonymous peer review process for articles. A necessary part of the peer review process is a reviewer’s report. In it, a reviewer provides a constructive, fair, and informative critique of the author’s work indicating weakness in scientific content and language and comments for improvement. He comments on the manuscript’s quality, its originality, the level of innovation, and on the manuscript’s contribution to the discussed matter.
b. Review reports should meet requirements for objectivity and confidentiality. The reviewers submit their report only to the editor-in-chief and he uses it as the basis for his final decision about publishing or not publishing of the article. The editor-in-chief can forward the report to the authors as the basis for the objectively given decision. Reviewers should submit their reports promptly to the editor-in-chief in a timely manner.
c. Reviewers should immediately alert the editor-in-chief of any real or potential competing interest that could affect the impartiality of their reviewing. They can even decline to review where appropriate. In any case, they should, however, conduct themselves fairly and impartially.
d. The reviewers’ identity should remain strictly anonymous to the author of the manuscript both before and after the peer review process.
e. The review process is strictly anonymous. The names of the authors and the reviewers are known to neither party. The reviewer’s identity remains strictly anonymous to the author unless the reviewer himself/herself decides to reveal his/her identity to the author.
f. The reviewer cannot be in any conflict of interest with the author’s research, with the author himself/herself nor with the subjects who financially support the author’s research and whose outcome is the author’s article.
g. Reviewers are obliged to inform the editor-in-chief or the editorial office if a similar article has been previously published elsewhere or if in the article there have been used irrelevant works.
h. Any personal criticism of authors and offensive or derogatory language in the critique is inappropriate and the reviewers must avoid it.
- Priority Principles of the StBiSl Publication Ethics
a. To ensure that articles published in StBiSl meet the international ethics principles and academic practices.
b. To prevent any negative influence on the intellectual rights and ethics principles or their misuse by the commerce.
c. To maintain an accurate and transparent academic record and publish corrections, clarifications, retractions of the article or its parts and apologies when necessary.
d. To ensure an anonymous peer review process.
e. To indicate suspicions of improper unethical behaviour and to take appropriate legal action when necessary.
5. Responsibility of StBiSl Editors, Editorial Board and Publisher
a. StBiSl editors (hereafter editors) should maintain and promote consistent ethical policies for StBiSl. Likewise, they should oversee and act to enforce those policies in a fair and consistent manner.
b. The editors should exercise the highest standards of personal integrity in their work. They should recognise and manage instances where they could have a competing interest or the appearance of a competing interest.
c. The editors work with authors, reviewers, and the members of the EB to ensure they are sufficiently advised regarding their journal’s ethics and publishing policies and that the journal’s stewardship on ethical matters is fair, unbiased, and timely.
d. It is the responsibility and the right of the editors to accept or to not accept the manuscripts sent to the review process which are not consistent with StBiSl scope.
e. The reviewers’ reports are the basis for the editor-in-chief’s decision about the manuscript publication. The editors have rights to publish the accepted manuscript in the whatever StBiSl issue.
f. The editor-in-chief cannot accept the publication of any manuscript that would not undergo the review process or whose review report was not positive. Without the review process, there can be accepted for the publication only the non-scientific contributions of informative nature, articles, monographs’ reviews, announcements or news.
g. The EB members may send their manuscripts for the StBiSl review process. The review process is, however, the same for all the authors, regardless of the authors’ role as editor in the EB.
h. The EB is committed to oversee, maintain and promote ethical policies for the StBiSl journal.
i. The EB is committed to maintaining an accurate and transparent academic record and to oversee that all the published manuscripts will meet the rules of the internationally accepted ethical politics and standards of academic work.
j. The EB guards the confidentiality of the authors’ personal data, the review process, the review reports’ contents and the content of the e-mail correspondence of the StBiSl EB with both the authors and the reviewers.
k. The StBiSl EB makes public, and occasionally also updates, the review process guidelines and the guidelines for manuscript style (see Instructions for Contributors) that should be followed. When the mistakes caused by the EB occur in the published issue, it is EB’s duty to make the corrections public.
l. The reviewers’ anonymity is strictly guarded.
m. The publisher is responsible for the prevention against any conflicting interests between the redactors, authors, reviewers and the members of the Editorial Board. Editor-in-chief, or his deputy respectively, resolves cases of publishing ethics abuse in accord with Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE) https://publicationethics.org/ or Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK), https://www.elsevier.com/editors/perk.
n. The publisher avoids any conflicting interests regarding the accepted or rejected manuscripts.
6. Members of the StBiSl Editorial Staff
a. Each member of the ES should promote fairness and equality, oppose discrimination, promote the transparency of and respect for the academic record, respect the confidentiality of others and be transparent about real or apparent competing interests.
b. Plagiarism. StBiSl and its publisher take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism and other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. Their effort is to protect the rights of the authors and always to investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. The protection of the StBiSl journal’s reputation against malpractice is an imperative.
c. Submitted articles to which reviewers have drawn the editor-in-chief’s attention due to possible plagiarism may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for instance, is found to have plagiarised other works or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, ES and its publisher reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum; retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author’s institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action in accordance with both the Slovak Republic and the European Union legislation.
d. Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. By the submitting of the article to the StBiSl review process and by the article’s acceptation for the publishing, the author gives his/her agreement with the publishing of the article in StBiSl. It is a kind of an exclusive licence agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants the StBiSl publisher the sole and exclusive right and licence to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than the StBiSl publisher. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society.
e. Permissions. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere.
