Editorial policy

Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (FASE) is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and we follow the recommendations of international organizations on the editorial policy of scientific publications:

● Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors 
● Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers 
● Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing
● COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers
● International standards for editors and authors, developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) 
● Guidelines and recommendations of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE)

Peer review policy
Peer review process
Authorship policy
Publication fee
Plagiarism detection
Ethical approval of studies and informed consent
Conflicts of interest and financial disclosures
The responsibilities of the Editorial Board
The role of Editors
Advertising policy

Peer review policy
FASE adopts a single-blind review mode, in which the reviewer’s identities are withheld from the authors but the reviewers are aware who wrote the paper they are evaluating. Reviewers are therefore required to keep manuscripts and the information they contain strictly confidential. Reviewers must not publicly discuss authors’ work and must not appropriate authors’ ideas before the manuscript is published. Reviewers must not retain the manuscript for their personal use and must not retain copies of manuscripts after submitting their reviews. Reviewers are expected to respond promptly to requests to review and to submit reviews within the time agreed. Reviewers’ comments should be constructive, honest, and polite.

Peer review process
The ScholarOne manuscript system is used for online submission to FASE (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/fase). FASE fully applies the ScholarOne’s peer review process. The key steps in this process for reviewers are
Receive invitation to review,
Accept invitation,
Review manuscript,
Complete review online, and
Submit review.
Each of these steps is described in detail in the ScholarOne Manuscripts Reviewer Guide.

Authorship policy
Only those who have contributed substantially to the work submitted to FASE are qualified to be included as authors. An author who is willing to take credit for a paper must also take responsibility for its contents. Thus, unless the text of the paper explicitly assigns responsibility for different parts of the paper to different authors, the authors whose names appear on a paper must share responsibility for all of it.
All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the article, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the article and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Publication fee
No publication fee is charged for papers published in FASE. Article processing charges (APC) are not applied. FASE also charges no fees for article submission and processing.

Plagiarism detection
FASE uses Crosscheck to screen for plagiarism.
FASE is a member of the CrossCheck plagiarism detection initiative. In cases of suspected plagiarism CrossCheck is available to the editors of FASE to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts by using the plagiarism detection tool iThenticate. CrossCheck is a multi-publisher initiative allowing screening of published and submitted content for originality. We also embedded the plagiarism detection tool iThenticate into our ScholarOne submission system, thereby manuscript will be automatically checked by iThenticate when it is submitted successfully.

Ethical approval of studies and informed consent
For all manuscripts reporting data from studies involving human participants or animals, formal review and approval, or formal review and waiver, by an appropriate institutional review board or ethics committee is required and should be described in the “Compliance with ethics guidelines” section. For those investigators who do not have formal ethics review committees, the national guidelines for the care and use of human or animals should be followed. For investigations of humans, state in the “Compliance with ethics guidelines” section the manner in which informed consent was obtained from the study participants (i.e., oral or written). Editors may request that authors provide documentation of the formal review and recommendation from the institutional review board or ethics committee responsible for oversight of the study.

Conflicts of interest and financial disclosures
A conflict of interest exists if authors or their institutions have financial or personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their actions. Financial relationships are easily identifiable, but conflicts can also occur because of personal relationships, academic competition, or intellectual passion. A conflict can be actual or potential, and full disclosure to The Editor is the safest course. Failure to disclose conflicts might lead to publication of a statement or even to retraction. All submissions to FASE must include disclosure of all relationships that could be viewed as presenting a potential conflict of interest. The Editor may use such information as a basis for editorial decisions.
The corresponding author should confirm that he or she had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. All authors are required to provide a Conflict of Interest Statement.

The responsibilities of the Editorial Board
Members of the Editorial Board are regularly and actively recruited to participate in the review process. Specific individuals are selected on the basis of their personal areas of expertise. An active and conscious effort is made to ensure that all reviewer panels have at least one member of the Editorial Board as a means of ensuring consistency and rigor in the overall review process.
The Editorial Board must undertake the following responsibilities:

● Commits itself to selecting and inviting competent reviewers with no possible conflict of interest with a given author. 
● Assures that all the materials published by its members are reviewed on equal terms with those by other authors. 
● Assures the impartiality of review. 
● Publishes full requirements to the authors in every issue as well as on the website of the journal. The rules are regularly renewed, with references to recommendations to authors by international associations being provided. 
● Decisions on accepting or rejecting an article are made based on its scientific significance, originality, clarity, data trustworthiness and its conformity to the subject matter of the journal. 
● Decisions concerning publication are not revoked unless new circumstances arise. 
● Publishes only original studies and articles that were not previously published in whole or in part and were not submitted to another journal. 
● Seeks to broaden the base of reviewers and assures that it is representative of the general orientation of the journal. 
● Reviewers are selected and invited from a wide range of institutions. 
● Privacy statement. Information about the authors (surname, name, family name, affiliation, e-mail, contact number), which is provided by them for publication in the journal, is available only for the Editorial Board. These details are provided purely to facilitate scientific communication. Collecting these email addresses for commercial use is not permitted, and the Editorial Board also must not transmit this information to the third party, who can use for some other purposes.

The role of Editors
We follow the intenational standards for editors of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the recommendations of International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE):
A. Responsibility of editors
Editors should encourage authors to strive for, and adhere themselves to, the highest standards of publication ethics. Furthermore, editors are in a unique position to indirectly foster responsible conduct of research through their policies and processes. To achieve the maximum effect within the research community, ideally all editors should adhere to universal standards and good practices. While there are important differences between different fields and not all areas covered are relevant to each research community, there are important common editorial policies, processes, and principles that editors should follow to ensure the integrity of the research record.
Editors should:
 ● Take responsibility for everything they publish.
 ● Make fair and unbiased decisions independent from commercial consideration and ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process.
 ● Adopt editorial policies that encourage maximum transparency and complete, honest reporting.
 ● Guard the integrity of the published record by issuing corrections and retractions when needed and pursuing suspected or alleged research and publication misconduct.
 ● Pursue reviewer and editorial misconduct;
 ● Critically assess the ethical conduct of studies in humans and animals.
 ● Told peer reviewers and authors what is expected of them.
 ● Have appropriate policies in place for handling editorial conflicts of interest.
B. Corrections and Version Control
When genuine errors in published work are pointed out by readers, authors, or editors, which do not render the work invalid, a correction (or erratum) should be published as soon as possible. The online version of the paper may be corrected with a date of correction and a link to the printed erratum. 
Honest errors are a part of science and publishing and require publication of a correction when they are detected. Corrections are needed for errors of fact. Matters of debate are best handled as letters to the editor, as print or electronic correspondence, or as posts in a journal-sponsored online forum. Updates of previous publications (e.g., an updated systematic review or clinical guideline) are considered a new publication rather than a version of a previously published article.
If a correction is needed, FASE should follow these minimum standards:
 ● Publish a correction notice as soon as possible detailing changes from and citing the original publication; the correction should be on an electronic or numbered printpage that is included in an electronic or a print Table of Contents to ensure proper indexing.
 ● Post a new article version (Erratum) with details of the changes from the original version and the date(s) on which the changes were made.
 ● Archive all prior versions of the article. This archive can be either directly accessible to readers or can be made available to the reader on request.
 ● Previous electronic versions should prominently note that there are more recent versions of the article.
 ● The citation should be to the most recent version. Errors serious enough to invalidate a paper’s results and conclusions may require retraction.
C. Expressions of Concern, and Retraction 
If the error renders the work or substantial parts of it invalid, the paper should be retracted with an explanation as to the reason for retraction (i.e., honest error). Expressions of concern and retractions should not simply be a letter to the editor. Rather, they should be prominently labelled, appear on an electronic or numbered print page that is included in an electronic or a print Table of Contents to ensure proper indexing, and include in their heading the title of the original article. Online, the retraction and original article should be linked in both directions and the retracted article should be clearly labelled as retracted in all its forms (Abstract, full text, PDF). Ideally, the authors of the retraction should be the same as those of the article, but if they are unwilling or unable the editor may under certain circumstances accept retractions by other responsible persons, or the editor may be the sole author of the retraction or expression of concern. The text of the retraction should explain why the article is being retracted and include a complete citation reference to that article. Retracted articles should remain in the public domain and be clearly labelled as retracted.
The validity of previous work by the author of a fraudulent paper cannot be assumed. Editors may ask the author’s institution to assure them of the validity of earlier work published in their journals, or they may retract it. If this is not done, editors may choose to publish an announcement expressing concern that the validity of previously published work is uncertain.
The integrity of research may also be compromised by inappropriate methodology that could lead to retraction. See COPE flowcharts for further guidance on retractions and expressions of concern. 

Advertising policy
We now accepts such non-commercial advertisements to be published in FASE as important article introduction, call for papers, scholar recommendations.