Environment and Social Psychology

This Journal requests all members involved in the journal publishing process to adhere to the Core Practices on publication ethics as stipulated by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

The publisher strictly adheres to the guidelines and best practices, which include Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals from the International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE) and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing developed by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

The journal editors take all possible misconducts seriously. The Editors, authors or readers can forward their concerns to the journal if they find out that the description in a submitted article may constitute an academic fraud, research misconduct or publication malpractice. The concerns or complaints on the possible allegations submitted to the journal will be dealt with promptly and appropriately according to the procedure set out in the COPE flowchart on complaints. The complainant may direct all inquiries and correspondence to the Publisher at editorial_office@as-pub.com.

This Journal adopts a zero-tolerance policy concerning any academic misconducts and ethical violations in research and publication regardless of the severity of these issues. The violations include plagiarism, falsification of research, data fabrication, submitting manuscripts of others as one’s own, submission of the same manuscript to different publication venues at the same time and breached intellectual property rights. In cases of suspected misconduct and ethical violation, a panel will be formed to investigate the allegation. If the allegation is supported by evidence, the submitted manuscript in question will be declined for consideration in the journal and all authors will be informed in this regard. A retraction initiated by authors or by the journal is required to take place if the paper has already been published, and the retraction will be made public. Authors of the work in question will receive the Panel’s Decision via email and all appeals regarding the decision will have to be made to the Publisher at editorial_office@as-pub.com within 28 days of the decision date.

Editorial Policies

Authors should read the “Author Guidelines” before making a submission, and make sure that the manuscripts were written in accordance to the style and specifications of the journal’s policy.

All manuscripts submitted to Environment and Social Psychology are subject to rigorous peer review. Prior to the peer review process, the manuscripts will be screened for acceptable English language, novelty and relevance to the Focus and Scope of the journal.

Any manuscripts submitted to Environment and Social Psychology will be treated as confidential materials. The manuscripts will not be disclosed to anyone except individuals such as editorial staff, reviewers and editors who participate in the initial screening, review, processing and preparation of the manuscript for publication (if accepted).

The journal will not accept a manuscript that has been published or is under consideration for publication in any other journal. The author needs to notify the journal if the data presented in the manuscript has been ever presented in conferences or other similar forums. The author will need to fill up the submission checklist to ensure that these criteria are fulfilled.

After acceptance, the Publisher will have the right to edit the work for the original edition and for any revision.

Conflict of Interest

Conflicts of interest may exist when professional judgements concerning a primary interest has the possibility of being influenced by a secondary interest (e.g.,financial gains). It is to be noted that even perceptions of conflicts of interest are as important as the actual conflicts of interest.

Any agreements with study sponsors (for profit or non-profit), which interfere with the authors’ access to the study data, ability to analyse or interpret the data and publish manuscripts independently according to their own decision, should be avoided by authors at all costs.

A declaration of interests for all authors must be received before an article can be reviewed and accepted for publication.

For authors:

While submitting, authors must list all competing interests relevant to this work, including but not limited to:

• Funding sources
• The role of sponsors in the work design, data collection, and results of the analysis.
• Whether the author is serving on the editorial board of this journal submitting to.

For editors and reviewers:

Editors and reviewers must declare any possible conflict of interests in connection with the manuscript, and if necessary, they must avoid the peer review process. When Editorial Board Members publish articles in the served journal, the editorial office will actively emphasize it so that the authors know that they recuse the potential peer review process.

Common reasons for editors and reviewers to be replaced include but are not limited to:

• The editor or reviewer works at the same organization as one of the authors.
• The editor or reviewer is one of the authors of this work.
• The editor or reviewer is on the avoidance list from the author(s).
• The editor or reviewer has a financial relationship or personal relationship with an author.

Statement of Informed Consent

Clients have a right to their privacy and it should not be violated without informed consent. Authors should protect their clients’ right to privacy by requesting oral or written consent from the clients or client’s parents/guardians/next of kin to publish his/her data, including photographs, prior to publication. Other details such as the race, ethnicity, religion or cultural background of a subject under study should be mentioned only when it is believed to have an impact on course of the disease and/or treatment discussed in the study. If changing the biographical details and/or identifying characteristics is done in order to protect anonymity, authors should provide assurance that the changes do not falsify the scientific meaning of a manuscript/report. The informed consent form/agreement should be included as a supplementary document of a manuscript during submission.

Human and Animal Rights Statement

Humans: When the submitted manuscript involves experiments performed on human subjects, including healthy volunteers, authors should adhere to WMA Declaration of Helsinki and indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the author's Institutional Review Board or Research Ethics Committee. Any possible adverse consequences of the work for ecosystems, populations or individual organisms must be weighed against the possible gains in knowledge and its practical applications. Authors are encouraged to follow the CARE guidelines while reporting a clinical case that involves the human subject. 

Animals: When reporting experiments involving animals, authors should abide by relevant international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. For studies involving client-owned animals, author(s) must declare that they have obtained the oral or written informed client consent during submitting and adhere to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care. 

Authors are encouraged to follow the ARRIVE guidelines while reporting animal research. 

Experiments on non-human primates should be performed in accordance with the recommendations set out in the Weatherall report (The Use of Non-Human Primates in Research).

Language

All articles should be written in English—either British or American as long as consistency is observed.

Authors should ensure that all submitted manuscripts are written in clear, coherent, and precise English in order to optimize readability.

Authors whose first language is not English may want to have their manuscripts professionally edited before the final submission to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by its prospective readers.

Units of Measurement

Units of measurement should be presented using only System International (SI) units.

Misconduction Policy

Duplicate Submission

Manuscripts submitted to ESP should:

1) not have been published before;

2) not concurrently be submitted elsewhere.

If part of a manuscript has been published or will be published elsewhere, the authors must let the editors know in a cover letter. If duplicate submission is detected during peer review, the manuscript may be rejected. If it is detected after publication, the paper may be retracted.

Plagiarism

The journal will strictly not accept manuscripts that are found to be plagiarized. The journal will verify the originality of submitted manuscripts with iThenticate, the plagiarism detection software.

If a manuscript uses a text copied directly from another source, this text must be written in quotation marks and original source must be cited. If any kind of plagiarism is detected during the review process, the manuscript will be rejected.

Authors and researchers can also use iThenticate to screen their work before submission by visiting http://www.ithenticate.com.

Authorship

Authorship of a scholarly paper should be limited to individuals who have contributed substantially to its intellectual content. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or general supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. All authors should hold the responsibility of fairly evaluating their respective roles and their co-authors’ roles in the project. This is to ensure that authorship is attributed according to a fixed standard in all publications for which they will be listed as authors.

In order to be listed as an author for a paper, one should have contributed sufficiently in the project. A co-author is expected to have contributed to some component of the work which led to the paper, or be involved in interpretation of its results. All authors should have a say in the final approval of the version to be published, in addition to reviewing the final manuscript prior to submission.

Individuals who do not meet the above requirements, but have provided a valuable contribution to the work, may be acknowledged for their contribution as appropriate to the publication.

Changes to Authorship

The authors should carefully check the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript. The Editorial Office considers the authorship list is definitive by the time the original submission is received.

Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made only before the manuscript is accepted for publication. The corresponding author should provide the reasons for the change in authorship list and the proof of written confirmation from all authors (including the existing authors, author(s) to be added and/or removed) agreeing with such change, to the Editorial Office.

The requests for authorship changes need to be approved by the Editorial Office before any changes can be made.