The Editor’s Office of the Journal "TERRA ORTHOPAEDICA" supports the basic standards of publication ethics of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE), the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing . The following phenomena are inadmissible for the Editor's Office:
- plagiarism – the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own;
- duplicate publication – submission of the same paper for publication in more than one journal;
- conflict of interests – hiding information which may directly or indirectly harm unbiased attitude to the article;
- conflict of authors – an intentional perversion of a fact of a scholar's participation in the research reported;
- fragmentation of the results – fragmentation of research in such a way to transfer one significant article into several different papers;
- research fraud – fabrication (making up research data and results, and recording or reporting them), falsification (manipulating research materials, images, data, equipment, or processes).
A reviewer’s ethical undertakings
1. The Editor's Office strives to meet the high ethical standards of scholarly researches, so the reviews must have the proper scientific level, consistent with the ethical requirements of this type of scientific activity.
2. A reviewer can refuse from reviewing handwriting if his/her qualification and focus of scientific studies do not correspond to the topic of the article.
3. Since the Law of Ukraine "On Copyrights and Similar Rights" protects an author's rights for the materials submitted to the Editor's Office, it is unacceptable for a reviewer to benefit from the writings obtained for a review, any author's reasonings, or conclusions.
4. Blaming an author in plagiarism demands the reviewer's reasonable grounding of his/her comments. Any comment on plagiarism or improper quotation has to be supported by proper references.
5. A reviewer having doubts regards plagiarism, authorship, or data falsification must appeal at the Editor’s Office to demand collective consideration of such an article.
6. To meet the terms of publication, the reviewer meets the review terms provided by the Editor’s Office (regularly not exceeding seven days).
Budapest Open Access Initiative
In response to the growing demand to make research free and available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, a diverse coalition has issued new guidelines that could usher in huge advances in the sciences, medicine, and health.
The recommendations were developed by leaders of the Open Access movement, which has worked for the past decade to provide the public with unrestricted, free access to scholarly research—much of which is publicly funded. Making the research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers.
The recommendations are the result of a meeting organized by the Open Society Foundations to mark the tenth anniversary of Budapest Open Access Initiative, which first defined Open Access. The recommendations include the development of Open Access policies in institutions of higher education and in funding agencies, the open licensing of scholarly works, the development of infrastructure such as Open Access repositories and creating standards of professional conduct for Open Access publishing. The recommendations also establish a new goal of achieving Open Access as the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and in every country within ten years’ time.
Translations of the recommendations have already been made in several languages, with more to follow.
For more on the recommendations, please see the press release as well as a blog post by Peter Suber which provides additional background on the Open Access movement.