Publisher Responsibilities

Publisher responsibilities

• publisher should ensure that editorial decisions on manuscript submissions are final and are only made based on professional judgment and will not be affected by any commercial interests.
• publisher should monitor the ethics of Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers.
• The publisher is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.

Editorial responsibilities

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_1.pdf)

Publication Decisions

• The editorial team should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
• The editor-in-chief is ultimately responsible for publishing the article in the journal.
• The validity of the paper and its attractiveness to researchers are the most important factors for influencing editor-in-chief decision-making.
• In addition, the editor-in-chief may be guided on this decision by the policies adopted by the editorial board and the legal requirements and copyright laws, and also, consult with other reviewers and editors.
• The editor makes the final decision on whether or not to accept articles based on the opinions of the judges and editorial board members. 

Editorial Evaluating Process

• Articles submitted to the journal are first reviewed by the editor or their successors.
• The article may be rejected at the outset because it is inconsistent with the topic of the journal or its poor quality (both literary and thematic).
• If the article is approved by the editor at this stage, it will be sent to three expert reviewers on the subject of the article. These reviewers are unknown to each other.
• The reviewers evaluate the paper based on scientific and literary quality and declare the result as "accept without change or reject and or accepted with minor/major revisions”.
• Finally, the editor reviews the results of all reviews and sends his/her final opinion to the authors. 

Fair Play

• The editor evaluates articles based on his/her intellectual content, regardless of race, gender, intellectual affiliation, religious beliefs, ethnicity, citizenship, or political affiliation.
• The editor's decision to accept or reject an article is based solely on the importance, authenticity, and clarity of the article and its relevance to the purpose of the journal.

Confidentiality

• The editor and any member of the editorial board do not share any article information with anyone other than the authors, reviewers, and publisher. The content of the arbitration process will also be kept confidential.
• The articles that are in the process of being reviewed and not published should never be used by the editor without the written consent of the authors.
• The information and ideas obtained from these articles should be kept confidential and the editor and his / her successors should not use it personally. 

Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

• The editorial team should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
• The editor or its successors should refrain from evaluating articles in which they may have a personal or group interest and delegate this task to other staff or members of the editorial board.
• The editor will also send an article to the reviewer, asking him/her to openly discuss with the editor any potential conflict of interest that may affect his/her arbitration results, and that the editor may change the reviewer, and elect a new reviewer. 

Appropriate Reviewe Process 

• Due to the journal's review policy (Double-Blind), the anonymity of the judges and authors should be maintained.
• Providing guidance to guest editors, authors, and reviewers on everything that they are expected to consider in a peer review process.
• The editor should ensure that the reviewers are properly selected.
• Creating and maintaining a database of qualified reviewers and updating it based on their performance reviews
• The system that communicates between authors and reviewers should pay attention to the anonymity of the reviewer and the names of the reviewers should not be disclosed to the authors neither in the reviewing text nor anywhere else.
• The editorial board should consist of well-known researchers considering the fields of the journal. The editor-in-chief should include the full name of the editorial board and their affiliations on the journal's website.

Reviewer’s Responsibilities

(https://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Peer%20review%20guidelines.pdf)

Confidentiality

• Confidentiality of article information must be observed in all areas. The article review process is to be done anonymously.
• Reviewers must keep all information about the articles confidential and treat them as secret information. 

Standards of Objectivity

• The reviews should be objective and neutral within a standard framework and on the other hand, the observations and judgments should be presented with solid arguments so that the authors can use them to improve the article.
• Reviewers' judgments about the quality and content of articles should be based on professional and objective opinions.
• Personal criticism of authors is inappropriate.
• Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
• If a reviewer feels he/she may not be able to review the article within the appropriate time, he/she must notify the editor and withdraw from the review process.
• Reviewers should express their views clearly with strong arguments. 

Conflict of Interest

• Reviewers should refrain from judging articles with conflict of interest and report any conflict of interest as soon as possible. 

Contribution to Editorial Decisions

• Peer review can help the editor decide whether or not to accept an article, and can also help the author improve the quality of the article through the editor's relationships with the author. 

Author’s Responsibilities

(https://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/1999pdf13.pdf)

Authorship Criteria

To ensure authorship for the submitted manuscripts, the contributors should meet the following three conditions:

• Conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data has been done by the author.
• Either drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content has been done by the author.
• The final approval of the version to be published has been given by the author. Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to be allowed to take public responsibility for suitable portions of the content. 

Authors’ responsibilities

The authors should provide a detailed account of what they have done, along with an objective discussion of the importance of their work. Basic data should be detailed in the article. An article should contain enough details and resources for others to continue work. Contradictory statements in the article are unacceptable.

Changes of Authorship

• After an article has been accepted for publication in the Research in Sport Management and Marketing, no additional authors or changes to the first or corresponding authors are allowed. If an author wishes to be removed from the byline, he or she must submit a letter signed by the author and all other authors indicating their wish to be removed from the list of authors. Any change in the authors' order in the byline requires a letter signed by all authors indicating their agreement.

The Principles of Transparency

Study design and ethical approval

Good research should be well-justified, well-planned, appropriately designed, and ethically approved. To conduct research to a lower standard may constitute misconduct. The authors are responsible for the whole scientific content as well as the accuracy of the bibliographic information. 

Data analysis

Data should be appropriately analyzed, but inappropriate analysis does not necessarily amount to misconduct. Fabrication and falsification of data do constitute misconduct. 

Data Availability

 Human and animal studies

Conflicts of interest

Peer-review

• This journal uses Double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity.
• Authors have the right to communicate to the editor if they do not wish their manuscript to be reviewed by a particular reviewer because of potential conflicts of interest.
• No article is rejected unless negative comments are received from at least two reviewers.
• This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site (Please See Peer review process).

Archiving

• The plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal's content is indicated. This policy sets out how the authors of RSMM can archive copies of their work on their web pages, corporate web pages, and various other subject repositories. 
• RSMM is an open-access license, articles can be made available immediately according to the terms of their specific Creative Common license. If an author has published an article under an Open Access license, RSMM would encourage the author to share the Version of the Record on publication as opposed to the Accepted Manuscript.
• Authors may also reuse the Abstract and Citation information (e.g. Title, Author name, Publication dates) of their article anywhere at any time including social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and Twitter, providing that where possible a link is included back to the article on the RSMM site. Preferably the link should be, or include, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which can be found in the Citation information about the article online. The accepted version may be placed on: the author's website and/or the author's company/institutional repository or archive. Self-archiving of the submitted version is not subject to an embargo period.
• RSMM is now formally archived at: 
• the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI).
• ISC
• Magiran
• Civilica

Publishing schedule

Privacy and Confidentiality

• With the strictest consideration for the authors' confidentiality, all manuscripts must be reviewed.
• While submitting manuscripts for review, authors entrust editors with the results of their creative and scientific labor, and their reputation and career may be on the line.
• It may be a breach of the author's rights to disclose private information while the author's manuscript is being reviewed.
• Editors must respect the reviewers' right to confidentially.
• Confidentiality may need to be broken if there is a suspicion of fraud or dishonesty, but it must be upheld otherwise.
• Editors are not permitted to reveal information regarding manuscripts (including their reception, content, status during the reviewing process, reviewer critique, or eventual outcome) to anybody but the authors and reviewers.
• Before the article is published, reviewers and editorial staff must respect the authors' rights by abstaining from publicly criticizing or appropriating the authors' work.
• Reviewers should only be permitted to share the manuscript with others if the editor permits them. They should not be permitted to make copies of the document for their personal files. 
• Copies of manuscripts that have been rejected shouldn't be kept by editors. 
• Reviewer comments should not be published or otherwise made public without the author, editor, and reviewer's consent. 

Ownership and management

Copyright and Licensing Statement

On the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge, this journal provides immediate open access to its content.

All journal papers are released under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaption, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as the original author(s) and source are properly credited. Under an open-access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly.

In this journal, authors retain copyright ownership for their content without restrictions. 

Advertising

The policy of the journal is not to have advertising. 

Corrections and retractions

To maintain the integrity of academic records, the journal may have to publish corrections or retractions of papers published in the journal. According to agreed academic community norms, published article corrections are made by publishing an Erratum or Retraction article, without altering the original article in any other way than by adding a prominent connection to the Erratum / Retraction article. The original article remains in the public domain and should be commonly indexed to the subsequent Erratum or Retraction. We may have to delete the material from our website and archive sites in the event the material is considered to infringe those rights or is defamatory. It may be necessary for the original author(s) to make minor corrections to published articles by commenting on the published Article. It will only be acceptable if the modifications do not affect the article's results or conclusions.

• Corrections

Changes to published articles that affect the article's meaning and conclusion but do not invalidate the article in its entirety may be corrected, at the discretion of the editor(s), by publishing an Erratum indexed and linked to the original article. Changes in authorship of published articles are corrected through an Erratum.

•  Retractions

If the scientific information in an article is significantly compromised on rare occasions it may be appropriate to retract published articles. In these cases, the Journal must comply with the COPE guidelines. Retracted papers are indexed and the original article is referred to.

Journal Policies

Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of Research Misconduct

Editor-in-Chief takes reasonable measures to find and stop the publication of publications that have engaged in research misconduct, such as plagiarism, citation trickery, and data fabrication/falsification, among other things.

The journal editor's initial step is to notify the Editorial Office of RSMM by sending copies of the pertinent documents and a sample letter to the associated author that requests an explanation objectively.

The topic is referred to the Publication Committee through the Editorial Office if the author's answer is unacceptably inadequate and it appears that substantial unethical behavior has occurred.  The Committee will decide if the situation is bad enough to justify prohibiting future submissions after considering it. 

If the misconduct is less serious, the Editor may, at the Publication Committee's recommendation, send the author a letter of reprimand and remind them of the RSMM publication policies. If the manuscript has already been published, the Editor may ask the author to publish an apology in the journal to set the record straight.
The offending author will be notified, and any work they or any coauthors have contributed to that is currently being reviewed by RSMM journal will be instantly rejected.

The authors are not allowed to be involved on the editorial board of RSMM or as a reviewer for this journal.
The right to take additional steps is reserved by RSMM.
A retraction notice will be printed in the journal and linked to the article in the online version in cases of substantial fraud that necessitate the retraction of the article. The retraction date will also be noted next to the word "retracted" in the online version. 

Procedure for Appeals and Complaints

We accept reasonable concerns to editor decisions. But in order to deal with the concerns of the editor and reviewers, you must offer strong reasons or new data/information. Editors rarely change their decisions after making a choice and don't anticipate many appeals. Therefore, you are highly encouraged to submit to another publisher if your manuscript is rejected. The Editorial Board's final judgments are frequently final, irrevocable, and cannot be changed because they are founded on the unbiased opinions of the reviewers. However, if you disagree with the decision of the publisher and believe you have a good reason to appeal, take the following actions:

• Explain your actual concerns and the reasons you disagree with the decision.
• Any additional material or data that you would like considered throughout the review process should be provided to the journal's editors.
• Provide evidence if you believe there was an interest conflict throughout the arbitration procedure.
• For each article, the editors only consider one appeal. The reviewers and editors who reviewed the essay may be contacted by the editors when they receive the appeal.
• Final decisions about appeals are determined by the editors and editorial board, who may decide to reject the article, request additional peer review, or request submission of a revised version of the manuscript.

Possible Misconducts

• Data Fabrication and Falsification

Data fabrication and falsification means the researcher did not really carry out the study, but made-up data or results and had recorded or reported the fabricated information. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but manipulated, changed, or omitted data or results from the research findings.

• Duplicate Publication

Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions. 

• Citation Manipulation

Excessive citations in a submitted manuscript that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and were included solely to increase citations to a given author's work or articles published in a particular journal are referred to as citation manipulation. This is a form of scientific misconduct since it misrepresents the importance of the specific work and publication in which it appears.

• Simultaneous Submission:

Simultaneous submission occurs when a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal when it is already under consideration by another journal.

• Redundant Publications:

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.

• Improper Author Contribution or Attribution: 

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

• Plagiarism

Plagiarism is intentionally using someone else’s ideas or other original material as one's own. Copying even one sentence from someone else’s manuscript, or even one of your own that has previously been published, without proper citation is considered by RSMM Journal as plagiarism. All submitted manuscripts are checked for similarity through iThenticate plagiarism detection tools to ensure their authenticity, and then they are rigorously peer-reviewed by expert reviewers.

If plagiarism is detected during peer review, the submission can be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we reserve the right, as necessary, to issue a correction or retract the article. We reserve the right to notify the authors' institutions about the plagiarism found before or after publication.

COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts  

RSMM  is committed to follow and apply guidelines and flowcharts of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in its reviewing and publishing process and issues.

COPE’s Code of Conduct and Best Practices for Editors

 For more information on COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts please see: 

(https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts-new/translations). 

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf),

(https://publicationethics.org/files/2008%20Code%20of%20Conduct.pdf)

COPE’s Code of Conduct and Best Practices for Editors

• Everything published in the journal is the responsibility of the editor-in-chief. This means that the editors must:
• Strive to meet the needs of readers and authors;
• Strive to constantly improve their journal;
• Have processes in place to assure the quality of the material they publish;
• Champion freedom of expression;
• Maintain the integrity of the academic record;
• Preclude business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards;
• Always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

Best Practice for Editors would include:

• Actively seeking the views of authors, readers, reviewers and editorial board members about ways of improving their journal’s processes.
• Encouraging and being aware of research into peer review and publishing and reassessing their journal’s processes in the light of new findings.
• Supporting initiatives designed to reduce research and publication misconduct.
• Supporting initiatives to educate researchers about publication ethics.
• Assessing the effects of their journal policies on author and reviewer behavior and revising policies, as required, to encourage responsible behavior and discourage misconduct.

Relations with Readers

• Readers should be informed about who has funded research or other scholarly work and whether the funders had any role in the research and its publication and, if so, what this was.

Best practice for editors would include:

• Ensuring that all published reports and reviews of research have been reviewed by suitably qualified reviewers including statistical review.
• Adopting processes that encourage accuracy, completeness and clarity of research reporting including technical editing and the use of appropriate guidelines and checklists.
• Considering developing a transparency policy to encourage maximum disclosure about the provenance of non-research articles.
• Adopting authorship or contributorship systems that promote good practice (i.e. so that listings accurately reflect who did the work) and discourage misconduct (e.g. ghost and guest authors).
• Informing readers about steps taken to ensure that submissions from members of the journal’s staff or editorial board receive an objective and unbiased evaluation.

Relations with authors

• Editors’ decisions to accept or reject a paper for publication should be based on the paper’s importance, originality and clarity, and the study’s validity and its relevance to the remit of the journal.
• Editors should not reverse decisions to accept submissions unless serious problems are identified with the submission.
• New editors should not overturn decisions to publish submissions made by the previous editor unless serious problems are identified.
• Journals should have a declared mechanism for authors to appeal against editorial decisions.
• Editors should publish guidance to authors on everything that is expected of them. This guidance should be regularly updated and should refer or link to this code.
• Editors should provide guidance about criteria for authorship and/or who should be listed as a contributor following the standards within the relevant field.

Best practice for editors would include

• Reviewing author instructions regularly and providing links to relevant guidelines.
• Publishing relevant competing interests for all contributors and publishing corrections if competing interests are revealed after publication.
• Ensuring that appropriate reviewers are selected for submissions (i.e. individuals who are able to judge the work and are free from disqualifying competing interests).
• Respecting requests from authors that an individual should not review their submission, if these are well-reasoned and practicable.
• Publishing details of how they handle cases of suspected misconduct.
• Publishing submission and acceptance dates for articles.

Relations with reviewers

• Editors should provide guidance to reviewers on everything that is expected of them including the need to handle submitted material in confidence. This guidance should be regularly updated and should refer or link to this code.
• Editors should require reviewers to disclose any potential competing interests before agreeing to review a submission.
• Editors should have systems to ensure that peer reviewers’ identities are protected unless they use an open review system that is declared to authors and reviewers.

Best practice for editors would include:

• Encouraging reviewers to comment on ethical questions and possible research and publication misconduct raised by submissions (e.g. unethical research design, insufficient detail on patient consent or protection of research subjects (including animals), inappropriate data manipulation and presentation)
• Encouraging reviewers to comment on the originality of submissions and to be alert to redundant publication and plagiarism
• Considering providing reviewers with tools to detect related publications (e.g. links to cited references and bibliographic searches)
• Sending reviewers’ comments to authors in their entirety unless they contain offensive or libelous remarks
• Seeking to acknowledge the contribution of reviewers to the journal
• Encouraging academic institutions to recognize peer review activities as part of the scholarly process.
• Monitoring the performance of peer reviewers and taking steps to ensure this is of high standard.
• Developing and maintaining a database of suitable reviewers and updating this on the basis of reviewer performance.
• Ceasing to use reviewers who consistently produce discourteous, poor quality or late reviews.
• Using a wide range of sources (not just personal contacts) to identify potential new reviewers (e.g., author suggestions, bibliographic databases).
• Following the COPE flowchart in cases of suspected reviewer misconduct.

Relations with editorial board members

• Editors should provide new editorial board members with guidelines on everything that is expected of them and should keep existing members updated on new policies and developments.

Best practice for editors would include:

• Having policies in place for handling submissions from editorial board members to ensure unbiased review
• Identifying suitably qualified editorial board members who can actively contribute to the development and good management of the journal regularly reviewing the composition of the editorial board.
• Providing clear guidance to editorial board members about their expected functions and duties, which might include:
• Acting as ambassadors for the journal.
• Supporting and promoting the journal.
• Seeking out the best authors and best work (e.g., from meeting abstracts) and actively encouraging submissions.
• Reviewing submissions to the journal
• Accepting to write editorials, reviews and commentaries on papers in their specialist area
• Attending and contributing to editorial board meetings
• Consulting editorial board members periodically (e.g., once a year) to gauge their opinions about the running of the journal, informing them of any changes to journal policies and identifying future challenge.