Editorial Guidelines   

Confidentiality— Editors of the journal must treat received manuscripts for review as confidential documents. Editors and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about submitted manuscripts to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher.

Equal Treatment—Editors of the journal must evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content and their contribution to specific disciplines, without regard to gender, race, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest— Editors of the journal and any editorial staff must not use materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript (published or unpublished) for their own research without the author’s written authorization.

Integrity of Blind Reviews—Editors of the journal should ensure the integrity of the blind review process. As such, editors should not reveal either the identity of authors of manuscripts to the reviewers, or the identity of reviewers to authors.

Publication Decisions—Editors of the journal are responsible for deciding which of the manuscripts submitted to the journal should be reviewed or published. However, editors may consult other editors or reviewers in making such decisions.

Cooperative involvement in investigations—Editors of the journal should conduct a proper and fair investigation when an ethical complaint (concerning a submitted or published manuscript) is reported. Such process may include contacting the author(s) of the manuscript and the institution, giving due process of the respective complaint. If the complaint has merits, a proper action should be taken (publication correction, retraction, etc.). Besides, every reported action of unethical publishing behavior should be investigated even if it is discovered years after publication.