If the Editors are made aware of an allegation of misconduct related to the published material, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines will be followed.
Editors encourage Authors, Reviewers and Readers to contact the Editorial Office via email any suspicion of misconduct, such as (but not limited to): plagiarism, data falsification, figures/tables/citation manipulation or reuse without proper consent, unethical AI usage, authorship, and contribution problems. Allegations brought to the Editors’ attention (pre- and post- publication) will result in specific-to-case measures that will be implemented according to the COPE guidelines.
Editors together with the Publisher will undertake an investigation in order to verify the allegations. The outcomes of the procedure will be communicated to the sender, to the subject of the allegations and to appropriate institutions. In the case of false allegations, the outcome will also be communicated to all parties involved, including the institution and managers of the whistle-blower.
Editor, Author and reviewer roles
The Journal follows the COPE Code of Conduct in defining roles and duties, as well as Recommendations for Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications specified by the Council of Science Editors (CSE).
Roles and responsibilities of the Editors:
Roles and responsibilities of the Authors:
The Journal follows the CSE guidelines that define the Authors’ roles The Author-Editor relation is founded on confidentiality.
Roles and Responsibilities of the Reviewers:
The Journal follows the CSE guidelines concerning the Reviewers’ roles and responsibilities:
Responsibilities toward the Authors:
Responsibilities toward the Editors:
Responsibilities toward the Readers:
Authors
The Journal follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines and defines the Author as a person who has made a significant intellectual contribution to the study, drafted or reviewed it critically for important intellectual content, given the final approval of the article to be published and is accountable for all aspect of the work related to the accuracy and integrity of any part of the work. One has to meet all the four criteria to be defined as an Author.
The Corresponding Author confirms that all the individuals listed as Authors have contributed significantly to the research presented in the submitted article. The Corresponding Author also confirms that all individuals listed as Authors have contributed to the entire manuscript.
Contributors
Individuals who do not meet all the four criteria of authorship cannot be listed as Authors. A proper acknowledgement of their input should be provided in the manuscript. As per the ICMJE guidelines. Such individuals may be responsible for:
In the case of individuals who have contributed unequally to the work, the Editors recommend that detailed information on their contribution be provided.
The Journal strongly supports the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) when describing each Contributor’s specific role. More information on CRediT can be found here.
Changes to Authorship
If the Authors request that an Author be removed or added after the manuscript has been submitted or published, they provide an explanation of the requested change and a signed agreement from all the listed Authors, including the Author who is to be removed or added.
Change of Authorship Request Form
Changes to Authorship are allowed only before the acceptance of the manuscript and only if approved by the Editor.
The Editor may agree to introduce changes to the Authorship. This includes name changes, addition, removal, or rearrangement of the Authors after the article has been accepted for publication. Such requests will result in a suspension of the manuscript until the issue is resolved. In the case of an already published material, a corrigendum is released.
AI Authorship
Upon submission of an article, the Journal requires the Authors to disclose whether they have used artificial intelligence AI-assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image creators). The Authors who have used such technology specify, in the cover letter or within the submitted work, the details of such usage.
The use of AI for writing assistance should be disclosed in the acknowledgement section.
Unaccepted Authorship
There are three types of authorship that are considered unacceptable:
The Journal follows the definitions of inappropriate authorship as specified by the Council of Science Editors.
Apart from misconduct allegations, Editors encourage Authors, Reviewers, Readers, and other individuals to contact the EiC, Editors, Editorial Board Members, the Publisher, or the Editorial Office in the case of complaints against the Journal, its staff, the Editorial Board, Publisher, or Reviewers.
Individuals wishing to raise a concern or make a complaint may send an email to sril.euroreg@uw.edu.pl. The appropriate party will investigate whether the correct procedures have been followed. The complainant will be notified about the outcome in writing.
Complaints may concern editorial decisions, published articles, the review procedure, delays, unethical behaviour, and any other activity that is seen by the complainant as important.
If the complainant wishes to pursue the complaint further, they may contact COPE directly. The procedure is available here.
All Authors must disclose any conflict of interest defined as a financial or personal relation with other individuals or organizations, activities or positions that can bias the submitted article. Such conflict includes but is not limited to matters of familial kinship, employment, consulting services, honoraria, and funding.
Conflict of interest also refers to any of the above-mentioned relations between Authors and the Journal’s Editors, Reviewers, Editorial Board, Editorial Office, as well as the Publisher.
Authors are advised to disclose any potential conflict of interest before submitting the manuscript or during the editorial procedure. The Journal will also acknowledge the post-publication disclosure.
Competing interests among the Journal staff, including Editors, Board, staff members and the Publisher, will be disclosed, if applicable, on the Journal’s website.
Reviewers are advised to disclose any potential conflict of interest when they agree to review a manuscript or, if not yet known, after the publication.
If a concern about a conflict of interest is made, the manuscript will be assigned to a different Editor or Reviewer.
In the case of an acknowledged conflict of interest, the review procedures and the editorial decisions will be made independently of the disclosed information, based solely on the quality of the manuscript. More information can be found in the Description of the Review Process section.
Research data typically refers to digital, machine-readable files and can be defined as the results of experiments and observations that validate the research. The Journal encourages Authors to post their data in standard formats that can be accessed and re-used by others.
The Journal follows the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets (FAIR) principles. It supports data integrity and encourages Authors to share the data associated with their research and any other information that supports it. The Journal also encourages Authors to share their data on social media, repositories, and personal and institutional websites.
The Journal supports the TRUST principles for digital repositories and encourages Authors to place the data in one of the repositories listed in OpenDOAR. Authors should also follow institutional and, if applicable, the funding body’s guidelines when choosing the platform to share their data.
Authors are also encouraged to cite the data in their manuscript or indicate how to access the data by providing the DOI or access number.
The Journal encourages Authors to share the VoR (Version of Record) and the AAM (Author Accepted Manuscript) together with the data associated with the research.
The Journal encourages Authors to consult this website in order to determine how the published article can be shared.
Authors, Editors, Publishers, and Readers adhere to the publishing ethics described herein on the Journal page.
The Journal encourages reports on any unethical practices such as, but not limited to, fabrication of data/research/figures/tables, plagiarism, authorship falsification, duplicate publication, peer review manipulation, concealment of conflict of interest, paper mill publication, and others.
Upon submission, the Corresponding Author has to receive the approval form from all the Authors. The forms must be available upon request to the Journal’s Editors and include all the necessary consents to the use of third-party materials. The consent has to be obtained also for any research on human beings, managing confidential data, and ethical nosiness/marketing practices.
If any concerns arise, Editors will follow the COPE guidelines.
Authors
All Authors are required to accept the License Agreement's terms and conditions. All Authors provide a signed agreement after acceptance.
By submitting the manuscript, the Corresponding Author, also on behalf of all the Authors, agrees that:
The Journal is published in an Open Access model under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Reviewers, Editors, Editorial Staff, Publisher
The Journal treats submissions as confidential during the whole editorial process until the manuscript is published. All individuals involved in the process, including Reviewers, proceed with adequate caution, most importantly to ensure that the manuscript or any of its parts are not disclosed, stolen or plagiarised. This also refers to instances of stealing research ideas.
Any allegations of theft or plagiarism must be substantiated and will be adequately investigated.
CC license
The Journal publishes under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license that allows to share the contents of the published material with appropriate attribution to the authors, for non-commercial purposes and without derivatives.
Sharing is defined as copying or redistributing the article or its parts through any medium and in any format for any purpose.
Users can freely access and use the published articles only when appropriate credit is given to the original publication and on the condition that they will not apply any legal terms or technological measures to restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Authors retain the right for the published material.
Authors grant the Journal a non-exclusive licence to publish their articles.
If Authors are not permitted to retain the copyrights to the manuscript, they should contact the Editorial Office before submission.
Fees
The Journal is published in an Open Access model. All published materials are freely and permanently available online immediately upon publication, without any charges (subscription, pay-per-view, etc.) or registration barriers.
There is no fee for Authors to publish their manuscripts. The Journal does not charge an Article Processing Charge (APC), submission fees, the editing process fees or page charges.
Readers are free to read and use the published materials as per the CC BY regulations.
Plagiarism, duplicate publication, and fabrication
Only original work can be submitted. All quotations need to be appropriately indicated and referenced.
Any unacknowledged copying of large chunks of text, misattributing the original authorship (including ideas, arguments, results) will be treated as plagiarism. According to the Office of Research Integrity such practices include, but are not limited to theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and a substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work.
When paraphrasing or summarising publications by others, Authors have to proceed with due care.
Text recycling is not allowed and will be treated as self-plagiarism (as per COPE guidelines: “sections of the same text appearing in more than one of an author's own publications”).
Duplicate/redundant publication occurs “when an author intentionally or unintentionally republishes his or her own work without informing the editor of the previous publication (…) and refers to publication of an article’s content, which has substantial overlaps with one΄s paper already published in print or electronically.” without proper references. (F. A. Habibzadeh and M. Winker, “Duplicate Publication and Plagiarism: Causes and Cures.” Notfall Rettungsmed 12, (2009), 415–418. DOI: 10.1007/s10049-009-1229-7).
The Journal is uses an anti-plagiarism tool to verify the originality of the submitted manuscripts. In the event of a plagiarism detection, the Editors will immediately reject the manuscript and they may, depending on the case, take further steps according to the COPE guidelines.
Already published articles will be retracted or marked as plagiarised.
Prepublication
Any fragment of work which has been already copyrighted to a third party, published, posted or reposited in the form that has been submitted to the Journal will be considered as pre-publication and consequently will not be published.
The Journal can publish a manuscript that has been uploaded on a preprint server or has a DOI only if a significant amount of new data or original material is added.
Preprint is not considered as prior publication only if the work fulfils the following definition: “a complete scientific manuscript (often one also being submitted to a peer-reviewed journal) that is uploaded by the authors to a public server without formal review” (Jeremy M. Berg et al., ”Preprints for the Life Sciences.” Science 352 (2016), 899-901. DOI:10.1126/science.aaf9133).
Discussions
The Journal supports post-publication debates regarding the published articles. Readers can submit their concerns, opinions, criticism, or letters of support. The Journal has the right to peer review the criticism, the response to criticism and to publish the discussion.
The discussions can also be held on third-party moderated platforms, such as PubPeer. As the Journal follows the COPE guidelines, the Editors require that criticism should:
Readers can express their concerns regarding the published material. The concerns should be sent via email at sril.euroreg@uw.edu.pl
Depending on the nature of the concern and the outcomes of an investigation, the Journal may publish:
In the above instances, the Journal follows the COPE guidelines.
Corrections
If an Author notices a mistake after the article has already been published, they are requested to contact the Editorial Office at sril.euroreg@uw.edu.pl. Depending on the nature of the error, the Editorial Office will investigate the case and decide whether an erratum or corrigendum needs to be published. Only for substantial errors the procedure of corrections will be taken. Reports on mistakes in punctuation, mistakes not influencing the meaning of the paper or not affecting the scientific integrity of the paper, will not be processed.
Retraction
The Journal follows the COPE guidelines with regard to the retraction process. An article will be immediately retracted if:
An appropriate retraction note will be published both as an individual statement, separate from the article’s contents, and within the article on the first page of the online version.
Article removal
The Journal will not remove any published material unless it gravely violates the law. In such case, retraction is not sufficient, since the article may be subject to a court order or pose hazard to human beings.
In such cases the body of the article will be removed and only the metadata (the names of the Authors) retained, followed by a statement that explains the removal due to legal reasons.
Changes to authorship
For information concerning changes to the names of Authors, the order of listing, the affiliations etc. see the section Authorship and Contributorship – Changes to Authorship.
All manuscripts submitted to the Journal are subject to a double-blind peer review (the identities of the Authors and the Reviewers are not disclosed). At least two external Reviewers will assess manuscripts initially accepted by the Editors after a technical screening and verification of the thematic scope.
Reviewers submit their reviews in writing, together with the declaration of potential conflicts of interest and information whether they detect any signs of plagiarism.
Reviewer form is available here. The review is anonymous and confidential.
If the review is not satisfactory, Editors may invite additional reviewers or discuss the case internally. It is always the Editor-in-Chief who makes the final decision on any material to be published in the Journal.
The standard peer review applies to all full-length articles and review articles.
Articles written by Editors, members of the Board or anyone else having a potential conflict of interest with the Journal (that needs to be disclosed) will be subject to the standard peer review procedure conducted by the Board members and Reviewers who do not have such correlation with the Authors.
In the case of articles authored by the Editor-in-Chief, the review process is managed by one of the Deputy Editors who also makes the final decision.
All the decisions are impartial, independent, and based only on the quality of the submitted material, also in the case of special issues or supplements.
The Journal publishes a list of Reviewers on the website, without disclosing details on the reviewed articles.
Depending on the nature of the supplementary material, such material may also be subject to the peer review process.
Any special issues and supplements are subject to the standard peer review procedure. Non-scientific material that is excluded from the external peer review procedure includes:
Detailed description of the Review Procedure is available here.
The University of Warsaw is committed to the preservation of scholarly research. In order to make the published content available and accessible the journal is archived in the University of Warsaw Repository (the process is not yet completed).
As per Polish legal regulations, the Journal is obliged to deposit copies of every published issue at the National Library of Poland. Upon publication, all the material is immediately sent to the Library and goes through archiving procedures.
The journal is also archived in the Polish National Library and the POLONA repository which are the basis for the journal’s plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content in the event a journal is no longer published.
This is an Open Access Journal with no subscription charges. The Journal does not receive any revenues from publication of regular issues.
The Journal is financed by the University of Warsaw.
Any revenues from special issues, supplements or any other form of subsidies or sponsorships that occur on an irregular basis, do not influence the decisions of the Editors.
There is no subscription fee.
The Journal does not accept publication of any advertising material.
In-house advertising might appear in the form of banners on the Journal website and within the Journal. Advertisements are not related in any way to the editorial decisions.
In the case of direct marketing, the Editors will make every effort to target them accurately and unobtrusively.
The Journal is published four times a year.
GDPR information clause – in English and Polish
GDPR information clause for authors – in English and Polish
GDPR information clause for reviewers – in English and Polish