JeSLIB Editorial Policies

Contents

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) editors have established these policies for editors, authors, and peer reviewers. The editors have been guided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Guide to Best Practices for Editors of Library and Information Science Journals.

JeSLIB strives to maintain the integrity of the academic record, publish content on a timely basis, respond to author correspondence, and to uphold current journal policies. The journal is dedicated to following best practices on ethical matters and any kind of unethical behavior is not acceptable. The Journal of eScience Librarianship does not tolerate plagiarism or publication misconduct in any form. Authors submitting articles to the journal affirm that manuscript contents are original. Furthermore, they warrant that their article has neither been published elsewhere in any language fully or partly, nor is it under review for publication anywhere.

Duties of Editors, Authors, and Reviewers

The following duties are outlined for editors, authors, and peer reviewers.

DUTIES OF EDITORS

  1. Publication Decisions: All submissions are subject to review and publication at the discretion of the editors. Each submission will undergo the journal's editorial decision process. Based on the peer reviews, the editor can accept, reject, or request modifications.
  2. Review of Submission: The editorial team (Editor-in-Chief and other editors) must ensure that each submission is initially evaluated for originality, making use of appropriate software to do so. At this stage, the journal editorial staff performs an initial quality screening of the submission and decides whether or not to send it for full peer review. Only after clearing the initial screening is the submission forwarded to at least two reviewers for anonymous peer review. Each reviewer will make a recommendation to accept, reject, or modify the submission.
  3. Fair Play: The editor must ensure that each submission received by the journal is reviewed for its intellectual content without regard to sex, gender, race, religion, citizenship, etc. of the authors.
  4. Confidentiality: The editor must ensure that information regarding submissions is kept confidential.
  5. Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest: The editors of the journal will not use unpublished materials disclosed in a submission for their own research without written consent of the authors.

DUTIES OF AUTHORS

  1. Reporting Standards: Authors should present an accurate account of their original research as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Submissions will follow the submission guidelines of the journal. (See Guidelines for Authors)
  2. Originality: Authors must ensure that they have written entirely original work. If plagiarism (unacknowledged copying or an attempt to misattribute original authorship, whether of ideas, text or results) is determined to have occurred, such submissions will not be considered for publication.
  3. Multiple, Redundant, or Concurrent Publications: Authors should not submit the same article to more than one journal concurrently. It is also expected that authors will not publish redundant articles or articles describing the same research in more than one journal. Material previously made available in a thesis, dissertation, preprint, meeting abstract, poster or other preliminary report must be disclosed in the cover letter accompanying the submission.
  4. Publication Guidelines: Authors must follow the submission guidelines of the journal. (See Guidelines for Authors)
  5. Submitting Your Revisions: The revised article should be uploaded in the online system in a timely fashion. Authors must also include a separate document, uploaded as a supplementary file, outlining the changes that have been made and point-by-point replies to each of the reviewers’ comments. The Editor has the right to ask authors to submit a revised version as a new submission that will receive a new number, and will undergo a new review process if a significant period (3-6 months or longer) of time has lapsed.
  6. Acknowledgement of Sources: Authors should acknowledge all sources of data used in the research and cite publications that have been influential in research work. Authors should follow the Guidelines for Authors for formatting and include DOIs when available.
  7. Authorship of the Paper: Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to conception, design, execution or interpretation of the reported study. Others who have made significant contributions must be listed as co-authors. The corresponding author also ensures that all the authors have seen and agreed to the submitted version of the article and their inclusion of names as co-authors.
  8. Data Access and Retention: Authors should provide raw data related to their study for editorial review and must retain such data. Authors are encouraged to make the underlying research data for their article available to the research community. (See Data Sharing)
  9. Human Subjects Research: Research involving human participants must be approved by the authors’ Institutional Review Board, or equivalent committee. Authors must address this process in the submission.
  10. Disclosure of Financial Support: Sources of financial support, if any, must be clearly disclosed.
  11. Fundamental Errors in Published Works: If at any point of time the authors discover a significant error or inaccuracy in a submission, the error or inaccuracy must be reported to the editor.

DUTIES OF REVIEWERS

  1. Confidentiality: Information regarding submissions should be kept confidential and be treated as privileged information.
  2. Acknowledgement of Sources: Reviewers must ensure that authors have acknowledged all sources of data used in the research. Any kind of similarity or overlap between the article under consideration or with any other published paper of which the reviewer has personal knowledge must be immediately brought to the editor's notice.
  3. Standards of Objectivity: Review of submissions must be done objectively and the reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
  4. Promptness: In the event that a reviewer feels it is not possible to complete the review of a submission within the stipulated time, then this information must be communicated to the editor, so that the submission could be sent to another reviewer.

Peer Review

JeSLIB uses an anonymous peer review process where the identities of the authors and reviewers are hidden from each other. The editor(s) perform an initial review of all submissions and may reject submissions that are clearly outside the scope of the journal. Submissions within scope will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. On completion of this process, usually within 6-8 weeks, the editor(s) will notify authors of the decision and provide review guidance and additional editing if deemed necessary. Authors are encouraged to write in a style that is clear and concise, and use visuals and references as necessary to document statements.

See the Guidelines for Authors for more information about the peer review process and instructions for authors.

Open Access

The Journal of eScience Librarianship provides immediate open access to its content. JeSLIB Editors believe making research freely available to the public best benefits research, scholars, education, and society. JeSLIB does not charge subscription, submission, copy editing, or author fees.

Copyright and Author Rights

  • Authors of original work accepted for publication in this journal grant first publication rights to the journal but retain ownership of the copyright of their content and all other rights.
  • Works published in this journal will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Authors may request a different Creative Commons license during the submission process.
  • For attribution, the author(s), article title, publication source (the journal) and the DOI of the article must be cited. For example: Originally published in: Coates HL. 2014. “Building Data Services from the Ground Up: Strategies and Resources.” Journal of eScience Librarianship 3(1):e1063. https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2014.1063
  • Authors retain the right to self-archive any version of their work (preprint, accepted manuscript, or final publisher version) on preprint servers, subject-specific repositories, institutional repositories, or their own website, as long as the work is properly cited and a link to the DOI of the published article is included.
  • Authors are responsible for obtaining the rights to use 3rd party materials prior to submission.

NIH-Funded Research

Under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, NIH requires that its funded investigators submit to PubMed Central (PMC) all manuscripts accepted after April 7, 2008, resulting from research supported in whole or in part with direct costs from NIH.

The Journal of eScience Librarianship does not deposit manuscripts on behalf of authors. NIH-funded authors should deposit the final peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMed Central themselves via the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS). Tutorials are available to illustrate how to perform various actions in the NIHMS system.

Human Subjects Research

Research involving human participants must be approved by the authors’ Institutional Review Board, or equivalent committee. The authors must address this process in the submission.

Data Sharing

To support JeSLIB’s goal to align data sharing with the FAIR Data Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and promote reproducible research, JeSLIB requires authors of Full-Length Papers, eScience in Action, and Data in Action articles to deposit the de-identified data associated with the manuscript in a secure repository providing a permanent identifier, long-term access, and sufficient metadata to ensure re-use by others. Authors must provide a Data Availability Statement that describes where the data can be accessed and that includes a permanent identifier such as a digital object identifier (DOI). JeSLIB’s article submission process includes a Data Availability field to enter this information.

Exceptions to this policy can be made for data that cannot be shared due to proprietary or privacy concerns. In those rare cases, authors must explain why data sharing is not allowed in the Data Availability field.

Open, non-proprietary formats such as csv, txt, and pdf are preferred. Authors should provide documentation with the dataset (for example, data dictionaries, codebooks, readme files) in sufficient detail for other researchers to reproduce the data. 

JeSLIB is using the definition of data from the NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing: “The recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate and replicate research findings, regardless of whether the data are used to support scholarly publications.” Examples of data are spreadsheets, text files, transcripts of interviews, survey results, images, and computer code or scripts. Survey instruments and rubrics are not considered data; these materials should be labeled as appendixes and submitted as supplementary files with the manuscript.

Possible secure repositories include institutional repositories, general repositories (for example, Dryad, Figshare, Harvard Dataverse, Open Science Framework, OpenICPSR, Zenodo), or subject-specific repositories. For a directory of research data repositories, see the re3data.org registry.

Authors are encouraged to also cite and include an availability statement for any source code that produces computational results (for example, simulations, models, or visualizations) or software packages (for example, Stata packages, R libraries). These can be made available in GitHub and archived in a data repository.

The Data Editor will assess compliance with this policy, verifying the Data Availability Statement, and will assist the authors in achieving compliance with this policy throughout the review process.

Examples of Data Availability Statements: 

“The data and code are available in eScholarship@UMassChan: Grynoch, Tess and Kimberly MacKenzie. 2022. “Data and Code from ‘Show Me the Data! Data Sharing Practices Demonstrated in Published Research at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.’” [Data set and code]. eScholarship@UMassChan. https://doi.org/10.13028/BPQ6-HF10.”

“The interview guide, interview questions, coding schema, and verified quotes supporting this study are available in Open Science Framework at DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/UAFH8. Additional quotes not in the manuscript are included, along with a list of recommended resources from participants to learn more about Research Reproducibility.”

Author Name Changes After Publication

The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) strives to support our authors and address issues around diversity, equity and inclusion. Authors who have changed their name can request that JeSLIB articles published under a previously used name are updated to reflect their new name. No legal documentation or proof of the name change is required. Upon receiving a request, all JeSLIB metadata and published content will be updated, and updated metadata will be re-delivered to indexing services. To protect the author’s privacy, JeSLIB will not issue a correction notice and will not notify co-authors of the name change. Authors should contact , Editor-in-Chief, with their name change request. Requests will be handled confidentially and as quickly as possible.

Copyediting

JeSLIB provides copyediting of articles free of charge. However, authors are expected to submit high quality manuscripts free of grammatical and typographical errors, and may be requested to complete additional editing if required.

Erratum

“A correction of a published article”

Despite best efforts, errors may occur. Corrections should be addressed in a timely and efficient way, and are the responsibility of authors and Editors. JeSLIB will post an erratum to the article on the article landing page as well as the article cover page with an explanation of the correction so that readers see the correction with the original work.

Retraction and Removal

“A public statement that withdraws, cancels, refutes, or reverses an original statement”

JeSLIB reserves the right to retract or remove any published works if the Editor(s) or Editorial Board find any instances of scientific misconduct, plagiarism, or unethical behavior.