Journal's Ethical Principles and Rules

Our journal adheres to international standards and COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) standards and publishes articles by referring to them.

ETHICS

Guidelines for Editors: An editor (editors and section editors) should objectively evaluate all articles submitted for publication, evaluating each on its own merits, regardless of race, religion, nationality, gender, seniority, or institutional affiliation. An editor should review and deal with a manuscript submitted for publication at reasonable speed. The editor has sole responsibility for accepting or rejecting an article for publication. The editor may seek assistance on an article from experts selected for their expertise and fair judgment. Until the review process is complete, the author should not disclose any information about the manuscript under review to anyone other than the author and appointed reviewers. It should respect the intellectual independence of the authors.

Authors: Our journal considers the person responsible for at least a part of the work as the author. Authors should be able to explain the problem in the study in depth. All authors for our journal are responsible for the content they submit. The corresponding author is responsible for accepting all authors from the first submission of the article and informing them about the submission process. If accepted, all authors are obliged to grant the publishing license on their behalf. Our journal assumes that the submission of the article is the complete agreement of all authors. For articles with more than 8 authors, all authors must make a statement stating what their contribution to the article is. It is not acceptable for JOTCSA to consider for publication anything that has been previously published, in whole or in part, in other journals. Simultaneous submissions to JOTCSA and any other journal is considered a gross misconduct and all authors are strictly prohibited and all previous publications in JOTCSA are publicly retracted. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism will be treated in the same way. Multiple articles that cover closely related topics and/or variables are not recommended unless they can be included in a single article.

For studies involving biological materials from animals and humans, the authors should state in their articles (preferably in the Acknowledgments section) from the authorized committee of their institution, as well as from the biological material donors or their relatives, that they performed the study in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and submit “informed consent forms” obtained from the ethics committee.

Reviewers: JOTCSA invites colleagues to review their submissions based on their expertise, curriculum, and willingness to voluntarily review. By agreeing to review a draft, the referee commits to doing so in a timely manner. Delays are extremely negative for the review process and make it take much longer than it should. When asked to reply to an invitation email from a reviewer, they are kindly wanted to respond to the invitation email by stating whether they are willing to review the article. This is a gesture of courtesy and avoids delays. By agreeing to review a manuscript, the referee declares that there are no conflicts of interest and that their review is for the enrichment and advancement of science. Reviewers who accept our requests and respect deadlines are scored positively and any final submissions they can submit to JOTCSA are given priority.

Journal's Open Access Policy: Our journal is open access and uses Dergipark's open access notifications. As soon as the article is published, it is rendered open access and anyone can access it without paying any fee.

The Budapest Open Access Statement (BOAI) on this subject reads:
“By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, which allows any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to, search for indexing the full texts of these articles. They may not be transferred to software as data or used for any other legal purpose other than financial, legal or technical barriers that are an integral part of gaining access to the Internet. The only restriction on duplication and distribution, and the sole role of copyright in this field, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly accepted and cited.”

Journal's Publication Policy: Our journal does not charge any page fee or article processing fee, etc.  The journal uses a double-blind peer-review policy to evaluate articles. The author presents his material and a secretary makes an initial assessment of it and decides whether the article is suitable for further processing or a rejection decision has been made. The same is true for all articles with a similarity score higher than 30% by iThenticate. It is welcome if the author decides to resubmit the material after substantial revision. When the article is accepted for peer review, the editor-in-chief decides who will be the section editor and forwards the article file to them. The section editor calls at least two referees who are experts in their fields and waits for their evaluations. The section editor collects the evaluations from the referees, makes a short list of the referees' suggestions, and sends the decision (acceptance, minor revision, major revision, rejection) to the author along with the article. These operations are fulfilled by Dergipark, so great time is saved. The author receives the report and starts working, answers the questions and submits the corrected article and the processed report. In some cases, the section editor finds this sufficient and does not need to send the revised material again to the reviewers. Otherwise, the referees comment on the revision and make their final decision. There are rare occasions when a revised draft needs additional editing sessions and the process starts over. After revisions, the article is likely accepted and forwarded to the copy editor, who examines the use of English and makes corrections to the article. The copied article is forwarded to the Layout Editor, who creates the final view of the draft and the final PDF file. The final PDF file is exported to the proofreader and retrieved as needed as a list of revisions or markup directly on the PDF. The PDF file is corrected and submitted ready for publication, the short name of the PDF file is set, the reference list is checked, the author list is checked, and the ORCID IDs are entered. As the last step, the title, abstract, publication date, and page range are checked and the DOI name is requested. If all goes well, the journal system allows the applicant to have a DOI name, then the article is registered in a journal issue, the ranking is determined, and the process is approved. The article is published and can be viewed on the journal's website. If something still needs to be fixed, the process starts again and the corrected article PDF replaces the old one. It should be noted that if the issue is published, there are five extra days to make changes. No changes are allowed after this period and the Erratum document should be issued and published in the next issue.

The time it takes to evaluate an article varies from article to article; however, it takes between two and four months to get results. Exceptions occur when a reviewer responds quickly or when the author prepares the report a few days after receiving it. In these cases, the assessment only takes a month or two. On the other hand, reviewers and authors may have delays, partly because the e-mail is caught by the junk mail filters and they are not aware of the progress; therefore undesirable delays occur. A similar reason is that the e-mail address of the reviewer or author is blocked or exceeded the quota, so the message never reaches the user.
The author is free to retract their article only at the first stage.

Conflict of interest: Authors should declare their conflict of interest (if any) at the end of the article. It should also be declared that there is no conflict of interest.

If there is a conflict of interest, the author or authors should be specific and state any financial affiliation of all authors of the article with any sponsoring organization and any for-profit interests represented by the organization and any product discussed or debated or for-profit.

Withdrawal: There is a form prepared by Dergipark that editors can fill in regarding issues of withdrawal,  and Dergipark will be informed.

For your information,
Prof. Dr. Hasan KÜÇÜKBAY
Chief editor, JOTCSA