Ethical Principles and Publication Policy


The Journal of Security Strategies has firmly committed not to accept any action contrary to scientific research and publication ethics. The Journal upholds the highest standards of publication ethics and pays regard to Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) on https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing

The authors should check that the articles are in accordance with the aim and scope of the Journal. Only those manuscripts approved by every individual author and that were not published before in or sent to another journal are accepted for evaluation. Changing an author's name (omission, addition or order) in papers submitted to the Journal requires written permission of all declared authors.

Plagiarism, duplication, fraud authorship/denied authorship, research/data fabrication, salami slicing/salami publication, breaching of copyrights, and prevailing conflict of interest are unethical behaviors. All manuscripts not in accordance with the accepted ethical standards will be removed from publication. This also contains any possible malpractice discovered after the publication.

Plagiarism

Submitted manuscripts that pass preliminary control are scanned for plagiarism using iThenticate software. If plagiarism/self-plagiarism is detected, authors will be informed. Editors may resubmit the manuscript for similarity check at any peer-review or production stage if required. High similarity scores may lead to the rejection of a manuscript before and even after acceptance. Depending on the type of article and the percentage of similarity score taken from each article, the overall similarity score is generally expected to be less than 15 or 20%.

Double Blind Peer-Review

After the plagiarism check, the editors-in-chief evaluate the eligible ones for their originality, methodology, the importance of the subject covered, and compliance with the journal scope. The editor provides a fair double-blind peer review of the submitted articles and hands over the papers matching the formal rules to at least two national/international referees for evaluation and gives the green light for publication upon modification by the authors in accordance with the referees' comments.

Research Ethics

The journal adheres to the highest standards in research ethics and follows the principles of international research ethics as defined below. The authors are responsible for the compliance of the manuscripts with the ethical rules.

  • Principles of integrity, quality and transparency should be sustained in designing the research, reviewing the design and conducting the research.
  • The research team and participants should be fully informed about the aim, methods, possible uses and requirements of the research and risks of participation in research.
  • The confidentiality of the information provided by the research participants and the confidentiality of the respondents should be ensured. The research should be designed to protect the autonomy and dignity of the participants.
  • Research participants should participate in the research voluntarily, not under any coercion.
  • Any possible harm to participants must be avoided. The research should be planned in such a way that the participants are not at risk.
  • The independence of research must be clear; and any conflict of interest or must be disclosed.
  • In experimental studies with human subjects, written informed consent of the participants who decide to participate in the research must be obtained. In the case of children and those under wardship or with confirmed insanity, legal custodian's assent must be obtained.
  • If the study is to be carried out in any institution or organization, approval must be obtained from this institution or organization.
  • In studies with human subject, it must be noted in the method's section of the manuscript that the informed consent of the participants and ethics committee approval from the institution where the study has been conducted have been obtained.

Author's Responsibilities

It is authors' responsibility to ensure that the article is in accordance with scientific and ethical standards and rules. And authors must ensure that the submitted work is original. They must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere or is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere in any language. Applicable copyright laws and conventions must be followed. Copyright material (e.g. tables, figures or extensive quotations) must be reproduced only with appropriate permission and acknowledgment. Any work or words of other authors, contributors, or sources must be appropriately credited and referenced.

All the authors of a submitted manuscript must have a direct scientific and academic contribution to the manuscript. The author(s) of the original research articles is defined as a person who is significantly involved in the "conceptualization and design of the study", "collecting the data", "analyzing the data", "writing the manuscript", "reviewing the manuscript with a critical perspective" and "planning/conducting the study of the manuscript and/or revising it". Fundraising, data collection or supervision of the research group are not sufficient roles to be accepted as an author. The author(s) must meet all these criteria described above. The order of names in the author list of an article must be a co-decision and it must be indicated in the Copyright Agreement Form. The individuals who did not meet the authorship criteria but contributed to the study must be in the acknowledgment section. Individuals providing technical support, assisting writing, providing general support, and providing material or financial aid are examples to be indicated in the acknowledgment section.

All authors must disclose all issues concerning financial relationship, conflict of interest, and competing interest that may potentially influence the results of the research or scientific judgment.

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published paper, it is the author's obligation to promptly cooperate with the Editor to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.

Responsibility for the Editor and Reviewers

Editor-in-Chief evaluates manuscripts for their scientific content without regard to ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, religious belief or political philosophy of the authors. He/She provides a fair double-blind peer review of the submitted articles for publication and ensures that all the information related to submitted manuscripts is kept as confidential before publishing.

Editor-in-Chief is responsible for the contents and overall quality of the publication. He/She must publish errata pages or make corrections when needed.

Editor-in-Chief does not allow any conflicts of interest between the authors, editors, and reviewers. Only he has the full authority to assign a reviewer and is responsible for the final decision for publication of the manuscripts in the Journal.

Reviewers must have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the research funders. Their judgments must be objective.

Reviewers must ensure that all the information related to submitted manuscripts is kept as confidential and must report to the editor if they are aware of copyright infringement and plagiarism on the author's side.

A reviewer who feels unqualified to review the topic of a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process.

The editor informs the reviewers that the manuscripts are confidential information and that this is a privileged interaction. The reviewers and editorial board cannot discuss the manuscripts with other persons. The anonymity of the referees must be ensured. In particular situations, the editor may share the review of one reviewer with other reviewers to clarify a particular point.

Open Access Statement

The journal is an open-access journal and all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Except for commercial purposes, users are allowed to read, download, copy, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapeşte Açık Erişim İnisiyatifi (BOAI) definition of open access.

The open-access articles in the journal are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Article Processing Charge

The National Defence University covers all expenses of the journal. There is no article processing charges or submission fees for any submitted or accepted articles.

Copyright Notice

Authors publishing with the journal retain the copyright to their work licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ) and grant the Publisher non-exclusive commercial right to publish the work. CC BY-NC 4.0 license permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Correction, Retraction, Expression of Concern

The editor should consider publishing corrections if minor errors that do not affect the results, interpretations, and conclusions of the published paper are detected. The editor should consider retraction if significant errors and/or misconduct that invalidate results and conclusions are detected.

The editor should consider issuing an expression of concern if there is evidence of research or publication misconduct by the authors, there is evidence that the findings are unreliable and institutions of the authors do not investigate the case or the possible investigation seems unfair or nonconclusive.

The guidelines of COPE and ICJME are taken into consideration regarding correction, retractions, or expressions of concern.

Archiving Policy

To guarantee that all papers published in the journal are maintained and permanently accessible, articles are stored in Dergipark which serves as a national archival web site and at the same time permits LOCKSS to collect, preserve, and serve the content.

Additionally, authors are encouraged to self-archive the final PDF version of their articles in open electronic archives that conform to Open Archives Initiative standards. Authors should provide a link from the deposited version to the URL of the journal on the National Defence University website.