Publishing Ethics and Malpractice Statement

1. Peer-review Process

All of a journal's content should be subjected to peer-review; peer-review is defined as "obtaining advice on individual manuscripts from reviewers' expert in the field of publication"; the process should be clearly described on the journal's web site; all judgments and findings in the peer-review process should be objective; reviewers should have no conflict of interest; reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited; and reviewed articles should be treated confidentially prior to their publication.

The IEEM journal keeps double blinded peer-review process. Each submitted manuscript is initially reviewed and appraised by the Editor-in-Chief based on its fit with the journal focus and scope, interests of the topics to the journal readers, their timelines and novelty, significance of the research in the fields, quality of the presentation, and potential impacts to the subject fields. If the manuscript passes the initial review by the Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief will send the manuscript to the Session Editor who oversees a session that the paper fits. The Session Chair will send that paper to at least two reviewers to review it. Those reviewers have no potential conflicts of interests, who can be editorial board members or external experts in the fields.

After completing reviews, the reviewers will return their review reports to the Section Editor. The reviewer's report includes reviewer's recommendations (such as major revision, minor revision, reject), general comments to the Editor, and general and specific comments to the author(s). The constructive comments in review reports might assist authors for improving their work. The Section Editor will add in his/her recommendation to the Editor-in-Chief based on evaluating review reports collectively from the reviewers. The constructive review reports also include the evaluation on whether relevant published work is not yet cited.

The Editor-in-Chief will then make a final decision (rejected, major revision, minor revision, or accept) on his/her own or in consultation with the other editors. The decision letter will be sent to the author(s) by the Editor-in-Chief including his/her decision, review reports from all the reviewers and the Section Editor. These constructive comments in the review reports will be anonymously sent to author(s), including rejected papers.

The Editor-in-Chief will determine if a revised manuscript needs further peer reviews, which will be the same procedure as the first-round review. The Editor-in-Chief makes the final acceptance decision of publication for all papers.

All judgements in the peer-review process are objective. All submissions are treated confidentially including the articles prior to their publications.

An application form needs to be filled in order to become a member of the IEEM reviews team. After reviewing the application form, the Editor-in-Chief will determine if the applicant is eligible to be a reviewer based on his/her qualification and notify him/her for acceptance or decline decisions on the application.

Once the applicant is accepted as a reviewer in the IEEM review team, the Editor will assign manuscripts in the reviewer's knowledge domain for review and request review reports. For revised papers, the reviewer needs to check the improvements.

2. Publication Ethics

Publishers and editors shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred; in no event shall a journal or its editors encourage such misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place; in the event that a journal's publisher or editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct the publisher or editor shall deal with allegations appropriately; the journal should have available guidelines for retracting or correcting articles when needed; and finally publishers and editors should always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

The IEEM is a peer-review journal where the rigor scientific publication is expected. We are responsible to ensure that all manuscripts submitted to the IEEM have been evaluated based on their scientific merits in the research domain. To ensure that, all parties involved in each step of the IEEM journal publishing processes are required to perform ethical behavior, including journal editors, journal publisher, authors and peer reviewers.

2.1 Editors and Publisher's Ethics

• The IEEM publisher and editor take their effort to identify and prevent the research misconduct of paper publications in the IEEM journal. In order to prevent the publication of plagiarized papers, the IEEM is utilizing CNKI Research Misconduct Reference Checking System (Version 5.3) (https://check.cnki.net) to check plagiarism to ensure originality for all submissions to the IEEM.
• If any allegation of research misconduct occurs (such as plagiarism, copyright infringement or libel), the IEEM journal editor and publisher will deal with it appropriately. Announcements will then be published in the current issue for any retraction, clarifications or correction on the article.
• The Editor-in-Chief makes the final decisions on manuscripts submitted to the IEEM journal that should be published based on evaluation reports from reviewers, as well as his/her own judgement on the rigor scientific merits of intellectual contents from the manuscripts without commercial considerations.
• When the Editor-in-Chief evaluates the manuscripts submitted to the IEEM journal, there is no bias regarding race, gender, sexual, ethnic origin, citizenship, or religious belief of authors.
• In the double-blind review processes, the editor and staff in the editorial office will be guided to the peer-review policies. Author's professional profiles will not be provided to the reviewers, and the reviewers' identities will not be provided to authors.
• Editors should require authors to disclose any conflicts of interest such as connections of their papers with any institutions or organizations.
• Editors should not use any unpublished materials in the submitted manuscripts to the IEEM journal and ideas from peer reviewers' reports for their self-advantages without the written consent from authors.
• The review processes on sponsored supplements will be the same as those on the manuscripts.

2.2 Authors' Ethics

• Authors are required to present original research in the IEEM scientific publications with an acceptable ethical practice such as provide precise research procedures and accurate data sources.
• Authors are required to cite references and quote literature sources appropriately in their submitted manuscripts. Any copying or rephrasing from other articles should be cited accurately and appropriately. Plagiarism is an unethical behavior and unacceptable no matter it is intentional or unintentional.
• Authors are required to explicitly express or report any information used in the manuscripts that are obtained from any other sources such as confidential organizations, grant agencies, services or third parties.
• Co-authors listed in the manuscripts to the IEEM journal are only those who make significant contributions to their research work.
• Authors should disclose and acknowledge all sources of related financial or other conflicts of interest (such as grants, patents, etc.) at the initial submission of their manuscripts.
• Corresponding authors should communicate with the other co-authors throughout the whole peer review process, starting from the submission to the final version approval.
• If there is a significant error found in the publications by authors or third parties, authors should retract or correct their paper promptly and provide any correctness to the Editor-in-Chief.
• Authors should not submit their manuscripts to the IEEM journal that was published before.
• Authors should not submit their same manuscript or same research to more than one journal simultaneously.

2.3 Reviewers' Ethics

• Reviewers should keep any manuscript review requests from the editor as confidential including the manuscripts, and not show them to anyone except being permitted by the editor.
• Reviewers should inform the editor and excused themselves from the review processes if they are unable to conduct the reviews by the due dates, unfamiliar with the subjects or unqualified for the reviews.
• Reviewers should conduct their reviews objectively and provide their own review reports to help authors improve their papers, as well as provide recommendations (reject, minor revision, major revision, acceptance) to the Editor-in-Chief.
• Reviewers should report any substantial similarity found in the reviewed manuscript with other published articles to the Editor-in-Chief, if there is any.
• Reviewers should report any plagiarism found in the reviewed manuscript to the Editor-in-Chief, if there is any.
• Reviewers should provide uncited relevant publications to the authors, if there is any.
• Reviewers should provide criticism to paper citations to the authors if they found any citations in it are inappropriate.
• Reviewers should not consider any financial or other conflicts of interest of the manuscript such as connections of the manuscript with the authors, organizations and institutions.
• Reviewers should not use any unpublished materials in the submitted manuscripts and ideas obtained from the peer review process for their self-advantages without the written consent from authors.

3. Archiving

A journal's plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content in the event a journal is no longer published shall be clearly indicated.

The archives of all the IEEM publications are kept electronically. The journal contents are backup by creating archived files and storing on external hard drives for the purpose of preservation in any events.

All the prints of the IEEM journal are kept in the Editorial Office.

4. Ownership and Management

Information about the ownership and/or management of a journal shall be clearly indicated on the journal's web site; publishers shall not use organizational names that would mislead potential authors and editors about the nature of the journal's owner.

5. The Web Site

A journal's web site (including the text that it contains) shall demonstrate that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards.

To ensure the high ethical and professional standards of the IEEM journal, the journal website provides peer review procedures, authors' obligations, publication ethics, copyright and access information etc. on the journal website.

6. Publishing Schedule

For serial publications, this is the periodicity at which a journal publishes. This should be clearly indicated.

The IEEM journal is published six regular issues per year starting 2020. One volume contains all issues of one year.

The IEEM journal is also published special issues, which focus on specific research themes. The special issues editors can be invited by the IEEM journal editors to edit these special issues. The call-for-papers are announced on the IEEM journal website.

7. Name of the Journal

The journal name shall be unique and not be one that is easily confused with other journal(s) or that might mislead potential authors and readers about the journal's origin or association with other journals.

The name of the journal, Journal of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, is unique, which has no confusion with other journals.