ETHICAL STANDARDS
RITHA Publishing House acts in accordance with the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and frequently engage in the eLearning programme designed to help Editors/co-Editors/Editor(s)-in-Chief understanding publication ethics and offering them the tools and knowledge they need to approach any issues that arise, as:
- PDF flowcharts with advice on handling common ethics problems:
§ Conflicts of interest;
§ Authorship and contributorship;
§ Allegations of misconduct;
§ Data (including manipulation and fabrication);
§ Ethics issues around peer review;
§ Plagiarism. We have access to the service provided by Crossref and powered by iThenticate v2 - Similarity Check, which compares submissions against a database of 49 million works from 800 scholarly publishers.
- Other COPE guidelines (e.g. on retractions)
- Sample letters. These cover a wide range of publishing ethics topics and can be used as the basis of their own letter to an author when a publishing ethics issue arises. COPE has created templates for the first, second and final letters to authors.
- Database of all cases. The 500+ cases the COPE Forum has discussed since it was launched in 1997 are available to view in the organization’s searchable database (podcasts of the discussions are included, where available). For more recent cases, they will also be able to view follow-up information and the outcome.