Editorial Policies

Publication Ethics 
The journal strives to uphold the highest standards of publication ethics and takes all possible measures against any publication malpractices. The Journal also believes that ethical publishing requires the active participation of all parties involved in the act of publishing to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior: authors, reviewers, editors, and publisher. The Journal expects compliance with the Standards for Publication Ethics set forth below:

Authors
1- All authors must certify that the submitted manuscript is their original research. Plagiarism, falsity, fabrication, duplicate, redundant publications or other inappropriate manipulation are strictly forbidden.
2- All authors must certify that the submitted manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere.
3- All authors must certify that the submitted manuscript is not simultaneously being considered for publication in any journal.
4- All authors must notify Al-Kindi Publisher for Research and Development of all actual or perceived conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript.
5- All authors must conduct the research in a responsible and ethical manner that complies with relevant legislation and applicable industry rules and guidelines.
6- Upon discovery or notification of inaccuracies or significant errors in the submitted manuscript, all authors must provide retractions or corrections to the manuscript promptly.
7- All authors must identify all sources used in the creation of the submitted manuscript, including proper acknowledgement of the work and/or words of others and citation of relevant publications. 

Reviewers
1- All reviewers must review and evaluate the submitted manuscripts in fairness based upon its originality, significance and relevance without any favoritism or bias based on the origin of the manuscript, the author’s race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, origin, sexual orientation, religious beliefs.
2- All reviewers must provide the Editor-in-Chief with their professional credentials, education and experience that represent their expertise truthfully and accurately.
3- All reviewers must ensure sufficient time to complete a comprehensive evaluation of the submitted manuscript in a timely manner prior to consenting to the review assignment.
4- All reviewers must refuse to review the submitted manuscript that create any potential conflict of interest to the publisher and seek advice before they proceed further with manuscript review.
5- All reviewers must offer reviews which are impartial and constructive, devoid of any inflammatory, libelous, hostile, unfair, or derogatory comments.
6- All reviewers must preserve the confidentiality of unpublished manuscripts and refrain from discussing any details of the manuscript with anyone (including the authors) during and after the peer review process.

Editors
1- All editors must accept or reject the submitted manuscript on the basis of its journalistic or scholarly merit, which includes its originality, clarity, importance and relevance to the The Journal’s mission.
2- All editors must maintain objectivity when reviewing the manuscript and act without favoritism or bias based on the origin of the manuscript, the gender, national origin, race, ethnicity, political or religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or age of the author, or on the grounds of any commercial considerations.
3- All editors must adhere to the regulations which govern any conflict of interest and improper use of unpublished manuscripts as peer reviewers.
4- All editors must oversee the performance of both authors and peer reviewers, and ensure that authors and peer reviewers understand their roles in the process of reviewing manuscripts.
5- All editors must follow editorial policies which promote honest, comprehensive, and ethical reporting.
6- All editors must guarantee the confidentiality of unpublished articles and anonymity of peer reviewers.
7- All editors must pursue serious and alleged misconduct in the process of writing, submitting, accepting and/or rejecting, reviewing the submitted manuscript, for the purpose of protecting the integrity of the journal. Editors must also reject any manuscripts that raise any concerns about potential misconduct, making considerable efforts to ensure a full investigation is carried out and the issue resolved.
8- All editors must communicate corrections, retractions and/or revisions, if any, to the publisher, and in the case of an unpublished article also to the author upon identifying major errors or material omissions in the submitted manuscript.

Publisher
1- The publisher must uphold strict standards of publication ethics to preserve the integrity of the journal.
2- The publisher must offer the institutional support and provide useful resources needed to publish original and accurate manuscripts, including, as necessary, specialized legal counsel and review for issues of libel, infringement and copyright. 
3- The publisher must ensure clear policies are in place to give guidance, address and resolve editorial conflicts of interest.
4- The publisher must stop publishing any content that is not in accordance with these Standards for Publication Ethics.
5- If and when the need arises, the publisher must publish corrections, revisions, clarifications, retractions, and apologies promptly, and with due prominence.

Peer Review Process
The journal employs a double-blind peer review system to all submitted manuscripts. This system aids editors in making decisions on manuscripts and enables authors to improve their manuscripts, if they are indeed considered for publication. A more in-depth description of our peer review process is below.

When the manuscript arrives at the journal’s editorial office, the editor-in-chief of the journal carries out an initial desk assessment of the received manuscript based on the suitability of the topic according to the journal’s aims & scope, the author’s adherence to the journal’s guidelines (word count, language clarity, and format), importance of the topic and relevance to the journal’s readership. If the manuscript does not pass these initial checks, the editor-in-chief might reject manuscript immediately. If the manuscript successfully completes the initial in-house assessment, it is assigned to two expert reviewers without revealing the identity of the contributors to the reviewers. The reviewers are initially invited to review the manuscript by sending them the abstract of the manuscript. Upon acceptance to review the manuscript, the reviewers are sent the full text of the manuscript and requested to observe a deadline of a month as a maximum to submit their reports to the editor-in-chief. The reviewers are also required to disclose potential conflicts of interests, if any, that may affect the outcome of blind reviewing process.

The reviewers are provided with an online evaluation form requesting them to judge the manuscript in terms of the paper novelty, originality, valuable contribution to the existed field of study, ethical aspects, scientific misconduct, structure of the article submitted and its relevance to authors’ guidelines, references provided to substantiate the content, literature review, design and methodology, clarity of findings and discussion, documentation and referencing. The reviewers are also required to include general and specific anonymous comments to the author(s). If the two reviewers are in disagreement in their judgment on the suitability of the paper for publication, a second round of peer review may be initiated. Each online review report should conclude with a final recommendation for the paper submitted to the journal, which can be one of following: (a) accept without any changes; (b) accept with minor revisions; (c) accept with major revisions; (d) revise and resubmit; (e) reject. The editor-in-chief is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of the article. The editor-in-chief’s decision is final.

Open Access Policy
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

The journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License [BY-NC]. So that, referring to the journal’s content:

1- Any article published in the journal can be freely used and shared (free access to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format), as long as it is attributed to the author(s) and the journal by citing the name of the author(s) and the name of the journal [Attribution – BY].

2- The authors of the articles and the journal itself allow all types of non-commercial use of the papers and, on the contrary, restrict their use for commercial purposes [Non-commercial use – NC]

3- Users can use, reuse and build upon the material published in the journal but only for non-commercial purposes.

Plagiarism Policy
The journal regards plagiarism as a very serious offence. It is an illegal form of copying. Plagiarism is defined as the unacknowledged use of the work of others as if this were your own original work. Please be aware that we check all submitted manuscripts for plagiarism. We use Turnitin, the leading plagiarism-detection system, to check for similarity to previously published documents. All manuscripts containing plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, and dishonesty are rejected.

Examples of plagiarism:
1- Copying and pasting from the Internet and posting somewhere else without proper citation
2- Putting your name on another person’s essay or project
3- Copying exact wording from another person’s text
4- Using another person’s photo, diagram, tables, sounds, or ideas without proper citation
5- Presenting research in your own words without providing references
6- Purchasing another person’s text and using it as your own
7- Presenting ideas in the same format and order as your research source

By submitting paper for publication to the journal, Author(s) certify that:
1- I/We are fully aware that plagiarism is wrong
2- I/We know that plagiarism is the use of another person’s idea or published work and to pretend that it is one’s own.
3- I/ We declare that each contribution to your project from the work(s) of other peoples published works or unpublished sources have been acknowledged and source of information have been referenced.
4- I/We certify that you are solely responsible for any incomplete reference that may remain in my/our work.

Anti-plagiarism declaration:
I have read and understood the the journal rules on plagiarism. I hereby declare that this piece of written work is the result of my own independent scholarly work, and that in all cases material from the work of others (in books, articles, essays, dissertations, and on the internet) is acknowledged, and quotations and paraphrases are clearly indicated. No material other than that listed has been used. This written work has not previously not yet been published.

Copyright and Licensing Policy
1- Copyright
As an open access, The journal follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which states that:

You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

2- Publishing Rights
The journal will retain publishing rights without restrictions.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Retraction Policy
The journal strongly believes in maintaining and protecting the integrity of the academic record. Manuscripts formally published in he journal are considered as the “Version of Record”. Very rarely, when the scientific information in a manuscript is significantly undermined, it becomes obligatory for he journal to publish corrections to, or retractions of manuscripts published on the journal website, at the discretion of the editor-in-chief.

Article Corrections
Contributors are encouraged to report errors related to the accuracy of published information in their manuscripts. Errors that impact the manuscript considerably will be considered only. Corrections are made at the editor-in-chief’s discretion. The correction procedure is based on the publication stage of the manuscript. Corrections will be published under corrections and addendum in an upcoming issue of the journal.

Article Retractions
The manuscript published in the journal may be retracted due to scientific misconduct in some circumstances such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, fraudulent use of data or plagiarism. Concerned authors are required to submit a signed statement from to the editorial office before a manuscript can be retracted. The retractions are decided on a case by case basis by the editor in consultation with the authors and the reviewers of the manuscript. A retraction notice will be published and linked to the original manuscript being corrected and a link to the retraction page will be placed on the article published earlier.

Article Removal
In extremely exceptional circumstances, it may be mandatory to remove the published manuscript from journal website. This may happen if the manuscript is found to be defamatory or infringing on other’s legal rights leading to court order. Under such circumstances, the whole manuscript will be removed and replaced with a screen stating that the manuscript has been removed due to legal reasons.

Article Replacement
If the manuscript is found to include inaccurate data which may pose a serious health risk if acted upon by others, the authors of the original manuscript may wish to retract the manuscript and replace it with a corrected version. In this case, the above procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the manuscript retraction notice will contain a link to the corrected manuscript together with a history of the document.

Article Withdrawal
The manuscript can be withdrawn by the author(s) or the publisher. The manuscript can be withdrawn at any time before it is officially published online. If the authors request withdrawal of their manuscript, a signed withdraw request letter will be required to reach to editorial office prior to the withdrawal of the manuscript. The publisher can withdraw the manuscript if it is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines of the journal such as plagiarism, duplicate publication, multiple submission, fraudulent use of data or bogus claims of authorship.  In such case, the PDF version of the manuscript will be removed and replaced by a note that the manuscript has been withdrawn formally.

Waiver Policy
The journal  is a self supporting organization and does not receive funding from any institution/government. Hence, the management of the journal is solely financed by the handling fees received from authors. The manuscript handling fees are required to meet operations expenses such as manuscript processing, editing, publishing, online availability, internet services, webhosting, application development and support, etc. Being an open access journal, the journal does not receive payment for subscription as the journal is freely accessible over the internet. The journal provides immediate, worldwide free access to all published manuscripts. Readers can view, download, print, and redistribute any article without any financial barrier, enabling greater distribution of an article.

Authors are required to pay a fair manuscript handling fee for the processing of their articles.  However, there are no submission charges. Authors are required to make payment only after their manuscripts have been accepted for publication.

At the journal , we understand that some authors, students or institutions may have limited funding for their research activities.  Thus, we have instituted a generous waiver system that may ease the payment of the manuscript handling fee when their researchers choose to publish their manuscripts in our journal.  Our primary goal as stated in our mission is to accelerate the dissemination of knowledge through the publication of high quality research articles. We are continually pursuing this goal, without putting undue financial burden on researchers or their institutions. Hence, discounts are given to authors from the following low income countries:

Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Kiribati, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, Samoa, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Yemen, Zambia.