Ethics Policies
Ethics Policies and Good Publication Practices
Research Ethics
Alfa defends the principles of the declaration of ethics and good practices in publication, based on the Code of Conduct and Standards of Good Practice for Journal Editors from COPE, CSE, Equator Network, CNPq, FAPESP and Scielo.
Editor
The editor is responsible for implementing the editorial policy, supervising the editorial process and the jornal relations with authors, reviewers, readers, indexers, research support agencies, the scientific and public community, with transparency and quality control of the entire process under her/his responsibility.
Authorship
Submitted papers must be original and not have been published or submitted to any other journal or book. At the time of submission, the author(s) must agree with the statement explaining this standard and with the practices of open science communication .
Authorship rights are limited to those who contributed significantly to the development of the research, data interpretation and the development of the article. All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be mentioned in a note of acknowledgement.
Conflict of Interest
Authors and reviewers must explicitly and individually declare any potential conflict of interest of financial, political, academic or commercial origin.
In case of identification of a conflict of interest, either by the authors or by the reviewers, the Executive Editor will forward the manuscript to a reviewer with whom there is no conflict.
Plagiarism
Alfa uses software available online to check the similarity of content/plagiarism policy, with prior technical evaluation by the editorial team. Self-citations must not exceed 30% of the total references used to prevent self-referral from being considered self-plagiarism.
In addition, the journal counts on the collaboration of reviewers, who, at the time of the double blind evaluation, notify the editorial team of any substantial similarity between the manuscript in question and articles already published or simultaneously submitted to other journals, as well as other information considered relevant.
Articles resulting from theses and dissertations must make this information explicit, in order to avoid self-plagiarism. Texts cannot be coincident, totally or partially.
Human Research
The Brazilian study manuscript involving research or an experience report with human beings must present attached, as a supplementary document, a copy of the document attesting approval by a Research Ethics Committee, and the process number for this approval must be informed in the text.
For research articles developed in other countries, their authors must attach, as a supplementary document, a copy of a document attesting their approval, according to the rules of research ethics in the country of origin.
Retractions and errata
An article which has already been published in which misconduct is identified remains indexed in the journal's database (OJS and Scielo) as “retracted”. The retraction documents, upon statement by the author or by the editor, the retracted content and is published in the same journal volume as the article. Retraction is due when the identified misconduct refers to a specific part of the article, without compromising the whole of the published research. The article cannot be "deleted".
Equivocations and/or mistakes that do not constitute misconduct are corrected through errata.
References
ABEC BRASIL. CSE guidelines to promote integrity in publications of scientific journals, 2012 [Acessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: https://www.abecbrasil.org.br/arquivos/whitepaper_CSE.pdf
COPE - Committee on publication ethics, 2018 [Acessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: www.publicationethics.org
CSE - Council of Science Editors, 2018 [Acessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorial-policies/whitepaper-on-publication-ethics/
EQUATOR NETWORK, 2008 [Accessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: www.equatornetwork.org
FAPESP - Sao Paulo State Research Agency Code of Good Scientific Practice, 2014 [Accessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: www.fapesp.br/boaspraticas/
SCIELO - Criteria, policies and procedures for admission and permanence of scientific journals in the SciELO Brasil Collection, 2017 [Accessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: http://www.scielo.br/avaliacao/Criterios_SciELO_Brasil_versao_revisada_atualizada_outubro_20171206.pdf
SCIELO. Guide to good practices for strengthening ethics in scientific publication [online]. SciELO, Version September 2018 [Accessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: https://wp.scielo.org/wp-content/uploads/Guia-de-Boas-Praticas-para-o-Fortalecimento-da-Etica-na-Publicacao-Cientifica.pdf
SCIELO - Guide for the registration and publication of retraction, 2017 [Accessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: https://wp.scielo.org/wp-content/uploads/guia_retratacao.pdf
SCIELO - Guide for the registration and publication of Errata, 2017 [Accessed on 22 Feb 2021]. Available at: https://wp.scielo.org/wp-content/uploads/guia_errata.pdf
