Publishing Ethics — IJMEER | COPE-Aligned Ethical Standards

IJMEER follows the COPE Code of Conduct for journal editors and publishers. All parties — authors, reviewers, and editors — are expected to adhere to these ethical standards.

Author Responsibilities

Authors must ensure their work is original and has not been published or submitted elsewhere simultaneously. Plagiarism in any form — copying, paraphrasing without credit, self-plagiarism — is unacceptable. All submissions are screened for similarity (<15% threshold). Violations result in immediate rejection or retraction.

Authorship must reflect actual contributions to conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation. All authors must approve the final manuscript. Gift authorship, ghost authorship, and omitting qualifying contributors are violations. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring all co-authors agree to publication.

Raw data must be accurately reported. Fabrication (making up data), falsification (manipulating or selectively discarding data), and image manipulation beyond acceptable adjustments are serious misconduct. Authors must retain raw data for a minimum of 5 years after publication.

Authors must disclose all financial, personal, or professional relationships that could influence their research. This includes funding sources, employer relationships, personal associations, and competing manuscripts. Disclosure does not prevent publication; non-disclosure does.

Research involving human participants must have obtained informed consent and institutional ethics board approval. Animal research must comply with the 3Rs principles (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement). Ethics statements must be included in the manuscript.

Reviewer Responsibilities

Maintain confidentiality — do not share or use unpublished findings

Declare conflicts of interest and decline review if any exist

Provide objective, constructive, evidence-based feedback

Respect submission deadlines; notify editor if unable to review

Do not contact authors directly about their manuscript

Corrections, Retractions & Expressions of Concern

IJMEER follows COPE retraction guidelines. Corrections are issued for minor errors that do not affect conclusions. Retractions are issued when research is found to be seriously flawed, unethical, or fraudulent. Expressions of Concern are published when an ongoing investigation may affect reader confidence in a published work.

To report a concern, contact the Editor-in-Chief at editor@ijmeer.com with the subject line "Ethics Concern".