Aims and Objectives of the Journal. Publication Ethics

Publication Ethics

The collection “Environmental Safety and Natural Resource Management” adheres to the requirements established by the international Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which can be found on the COPE website.

Principles of Editor and Publisher Ethics

1. All submitted materials undergo careful selection and peer review. The editorial board reserves the right to reject a manuscript or return it for revision. The author is obliged to revise the manuscript in accordance with the reviewers’ or editorial board’s comments. However, manuscripts may be rejected without review if the editor considers that they do not correspond to the journal’s scope. When making a decision on publication, the editorial board is guided by the reliability of the submitted data and the scientific significance of the work, its compliance with the journal’s scientific direction and requirements. The editorial board does not publish manuscripts if there are grounds to believe they are plagiarized.
2. The intellectual content of manuscripts is evaluated regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, origin, citizenship, social status, or political views of the authors.
3. Unpublished data obtained from submitted manuscripts are not used for personal purposes and are not disclosed to third parties without the author’s written consent. Information from submitted manuscripts remains confidential and is not used for personal gain.
4. The editor and editorial staff must not disclose any information related to the content of a manuscript under consideration to anyone other than those involved in its professional evaluation. After a positive editorial decision, the article is published in the journal and posted on relevant electronic resources.
5. In accordance with international copyright legislation regarding electronic information resources, materials of the website, electronic journal, or project may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form (electronic or printed) without prior written permission from the authors and the editorial board. When using published materials in other documents, a reference to the original source is required.
6. During the publication process, the editorial board provides technical and informational support to journal users, offering authors detailed instructions on editorial and publishing procedures and informing them about the receipt and publication dates of materials.
7. The editorial board does not leave claims related to reviewed manuscripts or published materials unanswered and, in case of conflict, takes all necessary measures to restore violated rights.
8. The editorial board promptly responds to any complaints about the journal’s activities and ensures the resolution of problematic situations, taking into account comments and suggestions from readers, authors, and reviewers on how to improve its work.
9. Authors are provided with a detailed description of the peer review process; if deviations from the described process occur, the editorial board must provide an explanation to the author.
10. The editorial board determines the criteria for evaluating materials and selects reviewers for each manuscript.
11. Provides authors with detailed reviewers’ comments.
12. Ensures that the qualifications of all reviewers meet the level required for a professional publication and, if necessary, revises their composition.
13. Terminates cooperation with reviewers who provide low-quality or consistently delayed reviews.
14. Ensures fairness, objectivity, impartiality, and timeliness of the review process.
15. The editorial board reserves the right to perform minor literary editing and proofreading while preserving the author’s style. Editors may make minor corrections (fixing small errors) and clarify the content of articles, improving their quality without significantly altering their overall structure.
16. Confidentiality of submitted materials is ensured during the editorial and publishing process, in accordance with the Law of Ukraine “On Personal Data Protection” and the General Data Protection Regulation.

Principles of Reviewer Ethics

1. A manuscript received for review is treated as a confidential document and must not be shared or discussed with third parties without authorization from the editorial board.
2. The reviewer provides an objective and reasoned assessment of the research results presented. Personal criticism of the author is unacceptable.
3. Unpublished data obtained from submitted manuscripts must not be used by the reviewer for personal purposes.
4. A reviewer who considers themselves insufficiently qualified to evaluate the manuscript or unable to provide an objective review, including in cases of conflict of interest with the author or organization, must inform the editorial board and request to be excluded from the review process.
5. A reviewer must not evaluate a manuscript if they have personal or professional relationships with the author or co-authors that could influence their judgment.
6. Reviewers must adequately explain and justify their judgments so that editors and authors can understand the basis of their comments. Any statement that an observation, conclusion, or argument has already been published should be accompanied by an appropriate reference.
7. The reviewer should identify cases of insufficient citation of relevant work by other researchers; however, comments regarding insufficient citation of the reviewer’s own work may appear biased. The reviewer should inform the editor of any substantial similarity between the manuscript and any published article or manuscript submitted simultaneously to another journal.
8. The reviewer must provide feedback in a timely manner.

Principles of Author Ethics in Scientific Publication

1. The author(s) must present accurate results of the conducted research. Deliberate submission of false or falsified data is unacceptable.
2. The author must guarantee that the results presented in the manuscript are entirely original. Borrowed data must be properly cited with reference to the author and original source. Excessive borrowing, as well as plagiarism in any form, including unattributed quotations, paraphrasing, or appropriation of others’ research results, is unethical and unacceptable.
3. The contribution of all individuals who influenced the course of the research must be acknowledged, and references to works that were significant to the study must be provided.
4. Authors bear full responsibility for the content of their articles and for the fact of their publication. The editorial board is not responsible for any damage caused by the publication of an article. The editorial board has the right to retract a published article if it is found that someone’s rights or generally accepted norms of scientific ethics have been violated during the publication process. The editorial board informs the author, the recommending party, and the institution where the work was carried out about the retraction.
5. Authors must not submit a manuscript that is under consideration by another journal or has already been published elsewhere.
6. All persons who have made a significant contribution to the research must be listed as co-authors and share responsibility for the results. It is unacceptable to include individuals who did not participate in the research as co-authors.
7. If the author discovers significant errors or inaccuracies in the article during review or after publication, they must promptly notify the editorial board.

Ethics approval

Obtaining mandatory ethics approval is required, in particular, in cases where the research:

• involves human participants as respondents in surveys, interviews, observations, experiments, or other forms of research interaction;
• is related to the use of biological materials of humans or animals;
• includes research involving animals;
• involves the collection, processing, analysis, or publication of personal, confidential, or other sensitive data;
• falls under other specific requirements of the legislation of Ukraine or internal regulations of the institution.

Learn more

Conflicts of Interest

• Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted work must not be used in any research by the editor, reviewers, or any other informed party without the authors’ written consent.
• Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal or third-party advantage.
• The editor and any member of the editorial board must withdraw from the consideration of manuscripts in case of any conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships with any of the authors or organizations related to the manuscripts.
• The editor must require all authors to disclose relevant competing interests. If competing interests are identified after publication, corrections must be published. Retractions or expressions of concern may be issued if necessary.

Plagiarism Prevention

The journal “Environmental Safety and Natural Resource Management” accepts for publication only original materials that have not been published previously.

The journal uses software to detect textual overlap in submitted manuscripts: Detector Plagiarist, Antiplagiat, eTXT. Manuscripts in which plagiarism or unreferenced textual borrowings are detected are rejected by the editorial board prior to publication.

The editorial board defines plagiarism as follows:

Plagiarism (eng. plagiarism) – the publication, in whole or in part, of another person’s work under the name of someone who is not the author.

Self-plagiarism (eng. self-plagiarism) – the repeated publication by the author of substantial portions of their own scientific texts identical in form and content without indicating their prior or simultaneous publication.

Textual plagiarism – full or partial borrowing of text fragments (unchanged or modified) present in articles, abstracts, reports, monographs, qualification works, etc.

Actions that characterize plagiarism include:

• presenting someone else’s work as one’s own;
• copying words or ideas without proper attribution;
• intentional omission of references from the list of sources;
• providing incorrect information about the source (e.g., broken links);
• changing word order while preserving the overall sentence structure without referencing the source;
• copying large amounts of text or ideas even with references, when they constitute the majority of the article.

Authors bear full responsibility for the accuracy of the information in their articles, including the correctness of names, titles, and citations, in accordance with the current legislation of Ukraine (Law of Ukraine “On Copyright and Related Rights”).

Authors are also responsible for obtaining copyright permission to reproduce illustrations, tables, and figures taken from other authors and/or sources. Permission must be indicated below each element.