Ethical standards
Compliance with standards provided by international organizations on publishing ethics and recommendations.
Aquatic Living Resources fully supports the latest version of the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing released by the organizations involved in establishing and monitoring publication standards for Open Access journals and assessing the journal’s compliance with these guidelines.
Aquatic Living Resources follows the standards and guidelines provided by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), especially regarding misconduct and fraud, and how to act in front of such a case. COPE provides a code of conduct with best practices in publishing and flow charts that describe the publisher's and editor's actions, if such a case has to be resolved: http://publicationethics.org/. To authors with proven misconduct or fraud the actions available in the flowcharts will be applied.
Aquatic Living Resources’s ethical practice and policy is closely related to those published on the pages of EDP Sciences.
1. Publication criteria
Aquatic Living Resources submitted work implies that it has not been published and / or is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Aquatic Living Resources is a “Diamond” Open access journal; all papers are freely available without subscription or publication fees for authors as it is sponsored by Ifremer and IRD. No fee is applied for the submission of an article. For ethics in publishing consult COPE.
Aquatic Living Resources has adopted a rigorous examination of every submitted manuscript towards plagiarism or text recycling using SimilarityCheck. This tool allows the Editors-in-Chief to quickly identify even partial use of already published content, which cannot be re-published in this journal for various reasons, such as copyright issues, autoplagiarism, plagiarism, etc. In case of doubt, and in order to avoid any forms of plagiarism or text recycling, authors are invited to visit relevant webpages of universities across the world dealing with this topic, or probably the websites of their own institutions. Please visit these few examples:
- MIT
- Plagiarism.org
- Stanford University
- University of Toronto
- Université du Québec
- University of Oxford
- Univesität Heidelberg
- Université de Paris Descartes
If an article is submitted containing any forms of previously published content without citing the appropriate sources, the authors will be informed by the Editors-in-Chief. For an unpublished manuscript, in case of conflicts, the relevant COPE guidelines will apply. The details and updated version of the action of the Editors-in-Chief is available on the website of COPE.
2. Authorship
Aquatic Living Resources follows recommendations by COPE on what constitutes authorship in each discipline (see https://publicationethics.org/files/Authorship_DiscussionDocument.pdf). Those contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship shall be acknowledged.
3. Preprint servers
Authors are encouraged to submit to Aquatic Living Resources their research manuscripts previously made available for discussion and comments to their community via PrePrint Servers.
4. Stringent Peer-Review-Process
Aquatic Living Resources operates a blind peer review process.
All articles submitted to Aquatic Living Resources are scanned for plagiarism using Crossref Similarity Check Powered by iThenticate.
Aquatic Living Resources performs a stringent quality control process. Submissions need to pass an in-house quality check contains competing interest, ethical requirements, financial disclosures, compliance with Aquatic Living Resources’ data availability policy, etc.. In case a submission does not pass our rigorous in-house quality check and / or the submission fails compliance with the journal’s instructions for authors, or if the Editors-in-Chief observe a significant lack of scientific and/or language quality, submissions may be returned for queries or directly rejected.
Aquatic Living Resources’ submissions which passed this check are forwarded for assignment to the Editor-in-Chief. Together with Associates Editors - containing experts in the field of submission - an initial decision will be provided. Editors, reviewers and authors are all invited to fairness, objectivity, timely involvement and confidentiality during this whole process.
Aquatic Living Resources’ judgement initiating the Review Process: an expert in the area of the submitted work is appointed as Reviewer Editor selecting referees. Reviewers are expected to inform the Editor-in-Chief about any suspicion of misconduct.
After reviews have been received, the Associate Editor recommends a decision. All decisions are reviewed by the Editors-in-Chief for final decision which will be forwarded to the authors.
Aquatic Living Resources’ Editors-in-Chief have full authority for acceptance/rejection of the submitted manuscripts. Persons with a conflict of interest towards a submitted manuscript shall declare it and be withdrawn from the peer reviewing of the respective article.
5. Policies for publication of errata and for article retraction
Despite careful peer reviewing and article production, situations might occur where errata should be published or articles retracted. Aquatic Living Resources’ Editors-in-Chief, together with the publisher, therefore follow the flowcharts established by COPE. Due to changing guidelines or policies, these are not explained here but are accessible on COPE’s website here. Aquatic Living Resources then applies at any time the most recent policies.
6. Archiving
As soon as the journal has obtained indexation, in order to facilitate self-archiving, Aquatic Living Resources deposits open access articles in repositories in the relevant disciplines. Authors are also permitted to post the final, published PDF and / or press release of their accepted submission on a website, institutional repository or other free public server, immediately upon publication.