Policies

Open Access Policy

SIJMS follow an open access publication policy. All published articles have undergone a double-blind peer review process and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. Re-use of published articles is permitted as per the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) international license.

Allegations of Misconduct Policy

SIJMS strictly follows COPE Guidelines for allegations of misconduct https://publicationethics.org/guidance?classification=2771.

SIJMS advises the readers/reviewers/authors to submit any formal complaint to the Editorial Team via email editor.sijms@szabist-isb.edu.pk. All complaints will be dealt with full confidentiality.

The complaints can be on the grounds of the following misconducts:

Author Misconduct

Prior to Publication (Concerns raised by reviewers)

As part of the review process, any manuscript submitted may raise some concerns:

  • If the reviewer/s find/s any suspicious content (writeup/data, originality, redundancy etc.) regarding the integrity of the research, the reviewer/s must report such concerns to the journal.
  • Either the reviewer/s can highlight the valid concerns in the section “confidential comments to the editor’ in the OJS by submitting the review or email to the journal provided to them for review process.
  • The reviewer/s can ask the editorial team to provide the data or any other material related to manuscript before reviewers provide their final decision on the manuscript.
  • Once such concern has been received to SIJMS, the review process should not continue until the concerns are fully accounted for and the author will be asked to provide justifications or data (whatever asked by the reviewers).
  • The reviewer may also demand clarification where necessary. The reviewer should, however, avoid using indecent or accusatory language and limit the conversation to the relevant facts only.
  • If the author manages to eliminate all concerns, the review process may proceed with specific changes made by the author.
  • If the author admits to having committed the misconduct or has no explanation for the concerns raised, then the manuscript would be rejected forthwith.
  • The reviewers must be informed of the final decision on the manuscript in all cases.
AFTER PUBLICATION (CONCERNS RAISED BY READERS/WHISTLEBLOWERS)

The reader may have concerns about the published manuscript, the reader should validate the concern first and if the reader finds the concerns are valid, they must report to the journal through the email mentioned above.

  • The editorial team will respond to the readers with the thanks note and report this complaint to the editorial board.
  • If the editorial board finds that the complaints are invalid based on very weak grounds, the journal will reject/dismiss the case against the manuscript and report to the readers immediately,
  • If the editorial board finds the complaints are valid, they will discuss and investigate the matter on merit. There can be several allegations (plagiarism, fabrication of the data, redundant, conflict of authorship, image manipulation etc.). Each case must be dealt with accordingly in light of COPE ethical guidelines.
Reviewer Misconduct

Reviewer misconduct can also occur through coarse or non-constructive comments or, at the extreme, through misuse of the author’s data.

  • Minor issues are easily dealt with. If the review is of poor quality and/or has harsh/inappropriate comments/statements, Journal may avoid sending manuscripts to such reviewer/s in the future and such indecent comments should be deleted. The journal may also send the submitted manuscript to another reviewer if finds necessary.
  • If the reviewer has found/reported misuse of the author’s data, the case should be immediately reported to the editorial board and be dealt with strictly in light of COPE ethical guidelines.

Appeal & Complaints Policy

Appeal Against a Rejection

SIJMS follows the transparent process of review process and decisions either to publish or reject the manuscripts are made purely on a merit basis. However, SIJMS is open to accepting the appeal/s against rejection of the manuscript. If the author wishes to reconsider a rejection manuscript to the journal, they must write to the SIJMS official email mentioning their manuscript details.

The author is allowed to make an appeal only once for a rejected manuscript and will be sent to the next editorial board meeting whenever is scheduled after the date of appeal received to the journal. Only the corresponding author is allowed to appeal.

An appeal can be made if Author can:

  • Provide the details of why he/she disagrees with the decision. The author will be required to provide the answers to the comments of the journal and/or reviewers who contributed to the rejection decision.
  • Give any new information or data you would like the journal to consider.
  • Provide evidence if the author believes that a reviewer has made technical errors in his/her assessment of the manuscript.
  • Include evidence if the author thinks a reviewer may be in a conflict of interest.
Decisions Against Appeal
  • If the appeal against rejection is successful, the editorial board may send this case (including revised manuscript and author response) to the reviewer for merit decision. The author will be provided instructions by the editorial team on the submission of the revised manuscript to consider for another review stage.
  • If the appeal is unsuccessful, the decision will be final and no further request will be entertained by the journal.

Complaints Process Policy 

SIJMS welcomes the complaints against the process and publication ethics.

Complaint About Processes

Authors may email their complaints directly to the journal. The Editor-in-Chief together with Editor will investigate the matter and appropriate feedback will be to the complainant.

Complaint About Publication Ethics

Authors may send an email to editor.sijms@szbist-isb.edu.pk concerning ethical issues or complaints. The Editor-in-Chief along with the editorial board will follow the guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to deal with such complaints. The complainant will be given appropriate feedback on the complaint.

Conflict Of Interest Policy

SIJMS requires ‘no conflict of interest’ among authors for their submitted or published manuscript and requires the conflict-of-interest statement from authors with submissions.

A) AUTHORS

While submitting the manuscript, the corresponding author is required to provide the following information:

  • Name of funding agency/organization if the project is supported by such agency/organized
  • Role of funding agency/organization for supporting data collection or any other part of the research.
  • Any necessary information (financial and/or non-financial) which the author/s believes that it would be required to be known to editors/reviewers/readers.
B) EDITORS

JIISR-MSSE requires the editorial board and team members to declare any competing interest during the contract and update their designation whenever is changed. Further, any member of the editorial board should not deal with such manuscripts which he/she may find conflicts of interest from his/her side.

C) REVIEWERS

SIJMS team keeps in mind the possible “conflicts of interest” while assigning reviewers. SIJMS assures through a request for review that acceptance of invitations does not imply “financial or competitive interest

  • If a reviewer accepts the possibility of a “conflict of interest”, then a different reviewer is considered by the SIJMS.
  • If a reviewer fails to mention the conflict of interest, he/she may be removed from the reviewer’s list.

Review Policy

The journal employs double-blind peer review process, where both reviewers and authors remain anonymous to each other throughout the review process. All research articles are submitted to two experts, not belonging to the editorial Staff, editorial board and Advisory Board. The reviewers are chosen from national and international review panel comprising PhD holders with relevant domain, expertise and publications record. Every manuscript submitted for publication is read by the editorial team, for an initial review. If the article meets minimum quality criteria, it is sent to two reviewers.

Review Process

INITIAL/DESK REVIEW
  • Submitted manuscripts are first checked by the editorial team to ensure if the manuscript adheres the required formatting (APA 7th) and fulfils the word count limit (4000-8000 words) as prescribed by the journal.
  • The manuscript is also checked for plagiarism using Turnitin software. If the plagiarism report is below 19% and less than 5% from a single source, the manuscript is forwarded to the Managing editor.
  • Manuscripts that do not fall within the scope of the journal are ‘desk-rejected’.
DOUBLE-BLIND REVIEW
  • Manuscripts passed through the desk review are sent for a double-blind review process (one national reviewer and one international reviewer).
  • SIJMS selects the reviewers based on their subject and research expertise and give complete freedom to decide on the papers.
  • To ensure confidentiality and privacy, anonymous/blind manuscripts (without authors’ names and details) are sent to all reviewers.
  • Any paper rejected by the reviewers do not process further, and the author is notified accordingly.
  • If the manuscript is accepted by reviewers with minor changes, the corresponding author is provided with the comments and given ample time to incorporate the comments.
    • The corresponding author send the revised manuscript to the journal in a stipulated time.
    • The editorial board decides on comments and if the manuscript is ready for publication. The corresponding author is informed of the decision.
  • Manuscripts accepted by reviewers with major changes are sent to the corresponding author with ample time to incorporate all comments.
    • The corresponding author is responsible to submit the revised manuscript in a stipulated time and it is at the discretion of the editorial board to send the revised manuscripts to the same reviewers or any other reviewers if required. Otherwise, Editorial board may decide to send the manuscript for the publication process.
  • The corresponding author is responsible to respond the editorial board for all the changes suggested by the reviewers. If the corresponding author does not respond to the journal despite sending reminders, the editorial board has a fully right to reject the paper. Similarly, the corresponding author does not incorporate the required comments or justify on not incorporating the suggested comments. The editorial board has fully right to reject the manuscript.
DECISIONS ON ARTICLE

Reviewers will have four possible options for each article [1] Accept [2] Accept with minor changes [3] accept with major changes and likely re-review [4] Reject. In cases where there is a strong disagreement between reviewers, further expert advice may be sought. Based on the reviewers’ comments, the editorial team makes the final decision either to accept, reject or revise the manuscript and communicates the decision to the authors, along with referees’ reports. If significant revisions are proposed, acceptance is dependent on the satisfactory response to the proposed revisions by the author and may be sent back to the same reviewers for final decision or another reviewer depending on the availability of the reviewers.

Authorship Policy

SIJMS believes that the published manuscript is original and all the authors whose names are given in the manuscript have made significant contributions and fulfil the criteria of authorship as per COPE definition of authors https://publicationethics.org/resources/discussion-documents/authorship.

Authorship Credit

Authorship credits may only be awarded to those who have made a substantial contribution to the construction of the article. The corresponding author of the article is responsible for granting credits to co-authors who are heavily involved in the work. In addition, the corresponding author must ensure that all co-authors have endorsed the final submission and the ready-to-publish version of the article. Others who have been involved in some important aspects of the research should be recognized for their contribution in the acknowledgment section.

Changes In Authorship

The corresponding author is entirely responsible for providing the authors’ names when submitting the paper to the journal. Once the paper is accepted for publication, any addition, deletion or rearranging of authors’ names will not be entertained unless approved by the journal’s editor.

To request such an amendment, the corresponding author must provide the publisher of the review with the reason for the modification of the list of authors and a confirmation email from all authors that they agree. However, such a request cannot be accepted if the manuscript has already been published in an online issue,

Order of Authors

The corresponding author is responsible to provide consent on the order of the authors while submitting the manuscript. All authors must agree to the order of the authors. If the journal receives any conflict/complaint on disagreement from any of the authors, will hold the manuscript and reject if the authors do not agree mutually and provide the consent in writing through emails.

Guest/Ghost Authorship

SIJMS does not allow to provide the names of the guest/ghost author because such author/s make/s no significant contributions to the study, hence, do not qualify for authorship.

Plagiarism Policy

The journal only accepts similarity reports generated in-house using Turnitin software provided by Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan and adheres to the guidelines specified by HEC which states that the manuscript should have a similarity index of less than 20% from all sources. Moreover, the article should not contain similar content of more than 4% from a single source and before submission should be removed from the institutional repository if submitted in the form of a thesis.

Further, SIJMS does not accept self-plagiarism (Article/Manuscript/thesis submitted in repository usually in Turnitin by author or author’s institution)

whether it is from authors’ published or unpublished thesis or any form of work submitted by the author or any other institution in Turnitin repository or any other repository or database. The author is required to remove it from the repository before submission to Journal. For a detailed policy on plagiarism, please go through HEC Plagiarism Policy.

Publication Fee Policy

SIJMS does not charge any fee from the author in any form.

Article Processing Fee (APC): SIJMS does not charge any article processing fees.

Submission fee: SIJMS does charge any fee for submission.

Subscription fee: SIJMS does not demand the author to subscribe to the published journal. All the authors whose papers are published in the SIJMS can access the digital copy with an open access policy.

Waiver: SIJMS does not have any financial earnings. All the expenses pertaining to the journal’s management are managed by Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST).

Copyright Policy

SIJMS will follow an open access publication policy. The full text of all articles will be available free of charge as soon as they are published. The articles will be published and distributed according to the terms defined under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) international license, which permits remixing, transformation, or building upon the material, provided the original work is appropriately cited mentioning the authors and the publisher, as well as the produced work, is distributed under the same license as the original.

The work submitted to SIJMS implies that it is an original and unpublished work by the author(s), and does not infringe any copyright or other rights held by any other party neither previously published nor accepted for publication elsewhere and is not being considered by another journal for publication.

The authors shall be responsible for all information in the manuscript presented. It is the author(s)’ responsibility to obtain signed permission from the copyright holder to use and reproduce text, illustrations, tables, etc., previously published in other journals, whether electronically or in print. Although authors are not required to submit the raw data used to do quantitative or qualitative analysis at the time of submission, if any question arises about the accuracy or validity of the research work during the review process, the author(s) should provide raw data to the Editor.

Once the acceptance of a manuscript for publication is given by SIJMS, a corresponding author will be asked to sign and submit a completed Copyright Form on behalf of all co-authors of the manuscript. Authors are obligated to disclose any sponsorships or funding from an institution concerning their research in the copyright form.

Authors are not permitted to post the work on any platform online/offline, by any means, from the time such work is submitted to SIJMS until a final decision on the paper has been given to them. If a paper is accepted for publication, the authors may not post the work on any platform online/offline or at any other place, by any means, until the paper is published. SIJMS can reproduce copies of articles in any format in the future. Authors can post their papers on any platform once SIJMS publishes the online issue in which the author paper is published in the SIJMS published format available on SIJMS website under archive section.

Licensing Terms

SIJMS plans to publishe all accepted articles under a (CC-BY4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). By submitting the research article(s) the author/s agree to Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which states that anyone can:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Archiving Policy

SIJMS plans to preserve its published content on  PKP Preservation Network (PKP|PN). The journal has further ensured that the metadata of all of its open access journals is compatible with all the well-known repository services and databases. The journal also plan to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to all its issues and the contents, subject to financial approvals, to facilitate reaching their permanent links on the internet. Moreover, SIJMS automatically self-archives the data on SZABIST dedicated servers regularly.

Repository Policy

SIJMS plans to place the content on some known database repository, subject to financial approvals. Furthermore, SIJMS permits the author to deposit all versions of their article in any institution or other repository of their choice.

Correction Policy

  • SIJMS believes and is strictly in compliance of maintaining the integrity of the scientific record
  • Minor corrections that do not affect the scientific understanding of the paper (formatting or typographical errors or vocabulary preferences) may be rejected if submitted post-publication.
  • The correction procedure depends on the publication stage of the article, but in all circumstances a correction notice is published as soon as possible
ONLINE PUBLICATION

SIJMS plans to publish online.

Retraction Policy

SIJMS reserves the right to retract articles that are found to be fraudulent (e.g., containing data manipulation or misrepresentation) or in serious breach of one of our policies. Evidence of plagiarism, falsification of data, or other scientific misconduct associated with a published article is determined at the discretion of the Editorial board. Any scientific misconduct will result in the removal of the article and the printing of a retraction as is consistent with the guidelines of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) and COPE guidelines.

Privacy Policy

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal. They will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Subscription Policy

SIJMS plans to publish online. The online version is uploaded on SIJMS and can be downloaded under open access policy. SIJMS is open SIJMS does not ask authors or institutions/universities to subscribe our journal. Following are the subscription fee details:

SUBSCRIPTION CHARGES

There will not be any subscription fee for SIJMS as it will be online journal.