Journal Polices

Ethical Guidelines

Ukrainskii Khimicheskii Zhurnal / Ukrainian Chemistry Journal (UCJ) believes that ethical guidelines should be respected in the publishing in our Journal. With these guidelines the quality of the journal can be guaranteed. Science needs to be reliable and based on the right resources. To prevent articles from being unrightly duplicated or being subject to any other misconduct, every party involved in the publishing has to behave according to the ethical guidelines. Ukrainskii Khimicheskii Zhurnal / Ukrainian Chemistry Journal (UCJ) supports the ethical principles set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), available on its website: http://www.publicationethics.org/

Conflicts of interest

Reliability of the articles is important and thus any conflict of interest on the side of the author, peer-reviewer or the editors should be avoided. These conflicts of interest can be on the personal, financial or political and academic level. Authors, peer-reviewers or editors should, whenever these are relevant to the content being considered or published, declare their interests and affiliations, so that the appropriate measures can be taken by the editorial board. If needed, a statement can be made in the journal that a certain person has a personal, financial, politica, academic or religious conflict of interest with the topic. One of the measures that the editorial board can take when there is a conflict in interests, is to change the persons who are involved in peer-reviewing the article. Authors can also be prevented to publish their article in the magazines. The existence of a conflict of interest should however not prevent someone of being included in the list of authors, if they qualify for authorship.

Funding

Readers should know who funded the research project or the publication of a document. This can be a charity or government department, university or commercial company. And so:

  • Funders of a paper, in the form of persons, organizations or companies or any other form should be mentioned.
  • The role of the research funders or any other research contributors in the design or preparation of the article should be mentioned, if they are not mentioned in the list of authors. They can for example be mentioned in an acknowledgment.
  • If a funder wants to publish a supplement or separate section in a magazine, they should ask for permission of UCJ. Applications will be handled case by case.

Authors

  • Contributors and their sources have to be properly acknowledged in the article according to guidelines. Guidelines on notes and references can be find under the submission guidelines of the respected journal.
  • Authors of research papers should state whether they had complete access to the research data that support the article, and if not, they should state this in the article.
  • Authors and contributors should have approved the acknowledgement of their contribution.
  • When the article is written by a group of authors, the individual authors who have direct responsibility for the manuscript should be mentioned. When a group author manuscript is submitted, the corresponding author should indicate the preferred citation of the group name as well the names of the individual authors.

Confidentiality

It is important that authors and peer-reviewers handle the information carefully and that informants and research subjects are protected.

Authors should provide a statement in which they identify the ethics committee that approved that the study conforms to recognized standards. These standards ensure the reader that adequate steps have been taken to minimize physical and psychological harm to participants and to avoid coercion or exploitation. Across the scholarly disciplines there are variations in practice and standards around privacy and confidentiality. Where there is no consent of the individual that appears in a picture, the person should be made anonymous.

Authors should be careful in publishing images of objects that might have cultural significance and cause offence (as in for example religious texts). UCJ has the right to refuse articles that may cause offence or violations of human dignity.

Misconduct and copyright

UCJ has the right to alert potential misconduct to appropriate agents (for example, funders, employers or the editorial board). Authors and peer-reviewers have the right to respond to allegations and for investigations to be carried out with diligence. An allegation should be substantiated and proved right or wrong by the editors.

When errors affect the interpretation of information, UCJ has the right to publish 'corrections' (errata), whatever the cause of the error. Likewise, UCJ has the right to publish 'retractions' if work is proven to be fraudulent or 'expressions of concern' when there is a suspicion of misconduct. Depending on the size of the misconduct, the author's institution may be informed, and the author can be refused for a time to publish in the UCJ.

Plagiarism or duplication of another text is forbidden even if it is an author's previous publication. Plagiarism includes misappropriation or theft of intellectual property by copying another's work. Authors must thereby avoid duplication of another's research and must always make explicit what the source of their information is. The way to refer to sources is set out by the submission guidelines of the UCJ. UCJ has the right to refuse publishing articles that are suspected of duplicating another's work.

Duplication is not applicable to the copying of information from a university dissertation or thesis, posters or abstracts or results presented at meetings, provided that it is the author's own work. Results in databases registries can also be duplicated.

Authors that translate and publish material that has been published elsewhere should ensure that they have appropriate permission. They should always identify the source of the original material.