Policy highlights
Research Integrity
Editorial Fairness
Blind Peer Review
Author Accountability
Retractions and Corrections
- This policy provides the minimum ethical standards for journals affiliated with the Department of Mass Communication, Ebonyi State University.
- All participants in the research and publication process are expected to comply with credible, transparent, and professional scholarly standards.
- Authors must maintain honesty, originality, transparency, and professional responsibility in research design, reporting, and interpretation.
- Research participants, data sources, and intellectual contributions must be treated with dignity, accuracy, and proper acknowledgement.
- Plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, duplicate publication, and unethical AI-assisted content are prohibited.
- Editors assess manuscripts on merit, relevance, fairness, confidentiality, and academic quality.
- Editors must manage peer review professionally, declare conflicts of interest, and address misconduct appropriately.
- Submissions may be screened for scope, formatting, similarity, authorship accuracy, and ethical approval before peer review.
- Eligible manuscripts undergo blind peer review by qualified experts.
- Reviewers must work only within their expertise, remain objective, keep submissions confidential, and avoid bias or personal gain.
- Editors may accept, request revision, or reject manuscripts based on reviewers' reports.
- Authors must submit original work, report data truthfully, acknowledge sources, and disclose funding or conflicts of interest.
- Authors are responsible for obtaining ethical approvals where required and for correcting significant post-publication errors.
- Ghost authorship, gift authorship, self-plagiarism, duplicate publication, and citation manipulation are not acceptable.
- Research misconduct includes plagiarism, falsification, fabrication, image manipulation, duplicate publication, unethical experimentation, and misrepresentation of findings.
- Confirmed misconduct may lead to rejection, retraction, publication bans, or notification of affiliated institutions.
- All manuscripts are subject to plagiarism screening and AI-content scrutiny.
- Authors are encouraged to retain accurate records and provide underlying data where appropriate.
- Editors may request supporting data to verify research findings and improve transparency.
- Journals may issue corrections, clarifications, retractions, or expressions of concern where serious errors or misconduct arise.
- Retraction notices remain permanently linked to affected publications.
- Departmental journals operate an open-access model intended to widen scholarly access.
- Where article processing charges apply, they must be transparent and may not influence editorial decisions.
- Published work should be preserved through appropriate archiving and long-term accessibility systems.
- The Department reserves the right to revise the policy in line with evolving publication standards and ethical practice.
- Compliance with the policy is mandatory for all authors, editors, reviewers, and contributors.