Publication Ethics
Research Integrity and Publication Ethics
Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Bayanika Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science is committed to maintaining the highest standards of publication ethics, research integrity, editorial independence, and responsible scholarly communication. This statement defines the ethical responsibilities of authors, editors, reviewers, and the publisher throughout the submission, peer review, publication, and post-publication processes.
General Ethical Commitment
The journal upholds integrity, transparency, accountability, fairness, confidentiality, and academic responsibility in all publication activities. Manuscripts are evaluated based on scholarly merit, originality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, and relevance to the journal scope.
The journal is guided by internationally recognized principles of publication ethics, including good editorial practice, responsible authorship, transparent peer review, appropriate correction of the scholarly record, and prevention of publication misconduct.
Ethical Responsibilities of Authors
Originality and Integrity
Authors must submit original work that has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration by another journal, conference, book chapter, or publication venue. Any use of prior work, data, text, figures, tables, codes, or ideas from others must be properly cited and acknowledged.
Accuracy of Research Reporting
Authors must present their research honestly and accurately. Data, methods, experiments, results, and conclusions must be reported in a transparent manner. Fabrication, falsification, selective reporting, misleading interpretation, and intentional distortion of findings are unacceptable.
Methodological Transparency
Manuscripts should contain sufficient methodological details to allow readers, reviewers, and other researchers to understand, verify, reproduce, or extend the work where appropriate. Algorithms, models, evaluation metrics, datasets, and experimental settings should be described clearly.
Multiple, Duplicate, or Redundant Publication
Authors must not submit substantially similar manuscripts to more than one journal at the same time. Duplicate publication, redundant publication, excessive text recycling, and self-plagiarism without proper citation are considered unethical publication practices.
Acknowledgment of Sources
Authors must cite relevant prior work accurately and fairly. References should reflect the current state of knowledge and should not be manipulated through excessive self-citation, irrelevant citation, citation cartels, or coercive citation practices.
Research Involving Humans, Animals, or Sensitive Data
Studies involving human participants, animals, medical records, personal data, vulnerable populations, or other ethically sensitive materials must follow applicable ethical standards. Authors must provide ethical approval, informed consent, permission statements, or data protection declarations where required.
Data, Code, and Reproducibility
Authors are encouraged to provide data, code, supplementary materials, or implementation details when possible. When sharing is restricted by privacy, legal, ethical, or institutional reasons, authors should clearly state the reason and provide an appropriate data availability statement.
Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest
Authors must disclose any financial, personal, institutional, academic, or professional relationships that could influence the research process, interpretation of findings, or publication of the manuscript. Funding sources and relevant support must be clearly stated.
Correction of Published Work
If authors discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their published article, they must promptly notify the editorial office and cooperate with the journal in issuing a correction, expression of concern, retraction, or other appropriate post-publication notice.
Ethical Responsibilities of Editors
Editorial Independence
Editors are responsible for making editorial decisions based on scholarly merit, originality, technical quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, and relevance to the journal scope. Decisions must not be influenced by commercial, political, personal, institutional, or discriminatory considerations.
Fair and Objective Assessment
Editors must treat all manuscripts fairly and objectively. Manuscripts should be evaluated without discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, institutional affiliation, seniority, political view, or personal background of the authors.
Confidentiality
Editors must protect the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts, reviewer reports, editorial discussions, author responses, and unpublished research findings. Manuscript information must not be disclosed to unauthorized parties.
Reviewer Selection
Editors should assign manuscripts to qualified reviewers with relevant expertise and no conflicts of interest. At least two independent reviewers are normally invited for manuscripts that proceed to peer review.
Conflict of Interest Management
Editors must recuse themselves from handling manuscripts when they have conflicts of interest with the authors, institutions, funding bodies, research topic, or manuscript content. Alternative editors should be appointed when necessary.
Correction and Retraction Oversight
Editors are responsible for evaluating credible concerns about published articles and taking appropriate corrective actions, including corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, or editorial notices when justified.
Ethical Responsibilities of Reviewers
Objectivity and Constructive Review
Reviewers must provide objective, evidence-based, respectful, and constructive evaluations. Reviews should focus on scholarly quality, methodological validity, technical correctness, originality, clarity, and ethical compliance.
Confidentiality of Manuscripts
Reviewers must treat manuscripts and related materials as confidential documents. They must not share, copy, distribute, discuss, or use unpublished manuscript content for personal or professional advantage.
Competence and Timeliness
Reviewers should accept review invitations only when they have sufficient expertise and availability. If they are unable to provide a timely or qualified review, they should decline the invitation promptly.
Conflict of Interest
Reviewers must disclose conflicts of interest and decline review assignments when impartiality may be compromised by personal, professional, academic, institutional, or financial relationships.
Ethical Alert
Reviewers should notify the editor if they identify suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, data fabrication, image manipulation, unethical research, undisclosed conflict of interest, or substantial similarity with published work.
No Coercive Citation
Reviewers must not request citations to their own work, the journal's publications, or unrelated papers unless the suggested references are academically necessary and directly relevant to the manuscript.
Authorship and Contributor Policy
Authorship must be limited to individuals who have made substantial intellectual contributions to the conception, design, methodology, software, data curation, analysis, interpretation, writing, revision, supervision, or project administration of the manuscript.
All authors must approve the final version of the manuscript and agree to its submission. Contributors who do not meet authorship criteria should be acknowledged appropriately. Guest authorship, gift authorship, honorary authorship, ghost authorship, and inappropriate authorship assignment are not permitted.
Any request for authorship change after submission must be justified and approved by all authors. Authorship changes after acceptance are strongly discouraged and may be rejected unless supported by clear and valid reasons.
Publication Misconduct
Plagiarism
Presenting another person's text, ideas, data, figures, tables, methods, or results as one's own without proper attribution is prohibited.
Self-Plagiarism
Reusing substantial parts of one's own previously published work without appropriate citation, transparency, or justification is not acceptable.
Data Fabrication
Creating, inventing, or reporting data or results that did not occur in the research process constitutes serious misconduct.
Data Falsification
Manipulating research materials, data, experiments, processes, or results in a way that misrepresents the research record is prohibited.
Image or Figure Manipulation
Inappropriate alteration of images, charts, graphs, or experimental outputs that changes interpretation or misleads readers is unacceptable.
Peer Review Manipulation
Fabricated reviewer identities, fake review reports, peer review rings, or attempts to interfere with independent review are serious ethical violations.
Citation Manipulation
Excessive self-citation, citation cartels, irrelevant citation demands, or biased citation practices intended to manipulate metrics are not permitted.
Undisclosed Conflicts
Failure to disclose conflicts of interest that may influence research, review, or editorial decisions may lead to corrective action.
Ethical Oversight for Human, Animal, and Sensitive Research
Research involving human participants, animals, medical records, biological materials, vulnerable groups, minors, personal data, field sampling, biosafety risks, or sensitive information must comply with relevant ethical, legal, institutional, and disciplinary standards.
Authors must include ethical approval information, consent statements, data protection statements, and approval numbers where applicable. For research involving minors or vulnerable populations, authors must ensure appropriate consent, assent, privacy protection, and safeguards against harm, coercion, discrimination, or exploitation.
Data Availability and Reproducibility
Data Availability
Authors are encouraged to provide a data availability statement explaining whether the data are publicly available, available upon reasonable request, restricted, confidential, or unavailable due to ethical, legal, institutional, or privacy constraints.
Code and Computational Materials
For computational studies, authors are encouraged to provide source code, pseudocode, model parameters, software versions, experimental settings, and supplementary materials that support reproducibility.
Methodological Completeness
Manuscripts should include sufficient methodological information to allow competent readers to understand and evaluate the validity of the research process.
Responsible Data Handling
Authors must handle datasets responsibly, especially when working with personal, medical, institutional, confidential, or sensitive data. Anonymization or de-identification should be applied where appropriate.
Journal Policy on Generative AI and AI-Assisted Tools
Generative AI and AI-assisted tools may be used to support language editing, grammar checking, readability improvement, coding assistance, or data processing, provided that such use remains under human supervision and does not replace scholarly judgment, original analysis, or author accountability.
AI tools must not be listed as authors or co-authors because they cannot take responsibility for the integrity, accuracy, originality, ethical compliance, or accountability of scholarly work.
Authors must carefully review and verify any AI-assisted output. They remain fully responsible for the final manuscript, including factual accuracy, citations, originality, interpretation, and conclusions. When AI-assisted tools are used in manuscript preparation, authors should disclose such use in an appropriate declaration section.
Corrections, Retractions, and Updates to Published Articles
Minor or Substantive Corrections
Corrections may be issued when errors affect interpretation, metadata, author information, references, figures, tables, or other parts of the article while the main findings remain reliable.
Expression of Concern
An expression of concern may be issued when serious concerns are under investigation but the evidence is not yet sufficient for correction or retraction.
Retraction
Retraction may be considered when findings are unreliable due to misconduct or honest error, plagiarism, duplicate publication, unethical research, fabricated data, falsified results, or serious legal/ethical issues.
Scholarly Record
The purpose of correction and retraction is to preserve the accuracy and integrity of the scholarly record, not to punish authors. Notices will be made transparent and linked to the affected article.
Handling Allegations of Misconduct
Receipt of Concern
The editorial office receives a complaint, allegation, reviewer concern, reader concern, or internal finding related to possible publication misconduct.
Preliminary Assessment
The editorial office evaluates whether the concern is specific, evidence-based, relevant, and within the journal's editorial or ethical responsibility.
Editorial Investigation
The editor-in-chief, handling editor, or appointed editorial board member may examine documents, similarity reports, reviewer comments, author responses, data, or other available evidence.
Author Response
The corresponding author may be contacted to provide clarification, documentation, raw data, ethical approval, authorship confirmation, or other relevant explanations.
Decision and Corrective Action
Depending on the evidence, the journal may issue no action, correction, rejection, withdrawal, expression of concern, retraction, notification to institutions, or other appropriate measures.
Appeals and Complaints
Authors, reviewers, readers, or other parties may submit complaints or appeals related to editorial decisions, review procedures, publication ethics, authorship disputes, conflicts of interest, plagiarism, data concerns, or post-publication issues.
Complaints must be submitted in writing with clear evidence, manuscript details, article title, DOI or article link where available, and a concise explanation of the concern. The editorial office will assess complaints objectively and may consult editors, reviewers, independent experts, institutions, or legal advisors when necessary.
Personal attacks, abusive language, unsupported allegations, or repeated unsubstantiated complaints may not be considered. Confidentiality will be respected as far as possible during the investigation process.
Publisher Responsibilities
Editorial Support
The publisher supports the editorial team by maintaining the journal platform, publication workflow, archives, metadata, and technical infrastructure required for responsible scholarly publishing.
Protection of Editorial Independence
The publisher must not interfere with editorial decisions. Acceptance and rejection decisions must remain under the authority of the editorial team and must be based on academic and ethical criteria.
Long-Term Accessibility
The publisher supports long-term access to published articles through website maintenance, archives, metadata quality, and digital preservation efforts.
Ethical Corrective Action
The publisher cooperates with editors in handling corrections, retractions, misconduct investigations, complaints, and other publication ethics matters.
Contact for Publication Ethics Matters
Concerns related to publication ethics, research integrity, complaints, appeals, corrections, or retractions should be sent to the editorial office.
Email: [journal-email@bayanika.org]
Email subject: Publication Ethics Concern - BJAIDS
