Editorial Policies

Peer Review

All submitted manuscripts are subjected to a fair, unbiased and extensive peer review in consultation with the assigned journal's Editorial Board Member and independent internal or external referees (usually two reviewers), which have expertise in the field of the submitted manuscripts. The peer review applies a short and rapid, but fair and professional assessment on all submitted manuscripts. The journal's Editor-in-Chief is then decided on the submitted manuscripts based on all the peer reviewers' comments before conveying to the author(s).

All submissions from the Editor-in-Chief will undergo independent peer-review and assess by the journal's Editorial Board Member or in-house Editor for the decision on acceptance.

Copyediting and Proofs

Manuscripts must be written either in good American or British English, in a clear language, correct punctuations and consistent style throughout the manuscript. Authors are advised to send for professional English language editing service before submission. If authors need the English language editing service, please get the quotation by emailing to info@whioce.com. All manuscripts are copyedited before publishing in the journal.

Reprints

High-quality, bound/unbound, print/e-prints can be purchased for all published articles.

Editorial Policies

This journal follows a strict editorial policy set by Art and Design Publishing. All manuscripts are only eligible submitted by principal/corresponding author(s) or co-authors of the manuscript and should not be submitted by someone that is not in the list of authorship on their behalf. The principal/corresponding author will be required to submit an Authors Declaration Letter along with the manuscript, on behalf of all co-authors (if any). The journal will not accept a manuscript that has been submitted for consideration or published in any other journal. The authors need to notify the journal if the data presented in the manuscript has been ever presented at conferences or other similar forums. The author is required to check the submission checklist to ensure that these criteria are fulfilled. After acceptance, the Publisher will have the right to edit the work for the original edition and for any revision. Furthermore, any illustration, structure or table that has been published elsewhere must be reported and copyright permission for reproduction must be obtained.

Appeals and Complaints

If the submitted manuscripts have been rejected during initial screening or after peer review, the authors can make an appeal by referring it to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal by emailing to info@whioce.com. Complaints to Art and Design Publishing can forward to info@whioce.com.

Conflict of Interest

The author(s) should hold responsibility in declaring any conflict of interest with respect to their work. The author(s) must provide details of any relationship with the financial bodies or funding agencies that might influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All authors, Editorial Board Members, reviewers and editors must disclose any association in the manuscript that presents a conflict of interest. Conflict of Interest declarations or statements are published in each manuscript as provided by the author(s).

Plagiarism Prevention

We will not accept any submission with high similarity to the published texts in the articles or that are plagiarized under any circumstances. The journal will check the text similarity and the originality of the submitted manuscripts using commercial and widely acceptable plagiarism detection software, such as Turnitin. The plagiarism software checks the content against a database of periodicals, the Internet, and a comprehensive article database. Additionally, thereport states the percentage of similarity between the uploaded manuscript and the published materials that are available in the system. Any overlapped content in the manuscript is further scrutinized for suspected plagiarism based on the publisher's Editorial Policies. The publisher allows an overall similarity of 25% for a manuscript to be considered for publication. Published manuscripts, which are found to contain plagiarized text are retracted from the journal's website after careful investigation and approval by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. A ‘Retraction Note', as well as a link to the original article, is published on the electronic version of the plagiarized manuscript and an addendum with retraction notification in the particular journal.

Types of Plagiarism

We understands that it is not easy to have a clear boundary between legitimate representation and plagiarism as the scholarly manuscripts are written after thorough review of previously published articles. Therefore, the publisher has outlined several important features to assist in identifying different kinds of plagiarized content, as below:

1. The plagiarized words, sentences, ideas or findings from others as one's own without proper citation and acknowledgment.
2. Text recycling or self-plagiarism. The authors use a previous publication in one of the articles of the author without proper citation and acknowledgment of the original source.
3. Poor paraphrasing. All copied text by copying complete paragraphs and modifying a few words without proper paraphrasing or changing the structure of original sentences or changing the sentence structure but not the words.
4. Verbatim copying of text in any original source without placing quotation marks and citing or acknowledging the original author.
5. Unintentional plagiarism. The authors have properly cited an article of the original author but without sufficient paraphrasing the original text is considered. Similarly, manuscripts with language somewhere between paraphrasing and quoting are not acceptable. Authors should either paraphrase or quote and in both cases, cite the original source.
6. It is understandable that sometimes similarity in technical terms and/or standard procedures is hard to be a paraphrase, particularly in the sections of abstract, introduction, materials and methods, discussion and conclusion. Editors must review these sections carefully before making a decision, together with the explanation from the authors.

Copyright and License

Copyright

The authors shall retain the copyright of their work but allow the Publisher to publish, copy, distribute, and convey the work.

License